1 March 2021
Little seems to have changed since the fifties – the 1850s. Matthew Arnold, patrician incarnate, still rules. His prescribed essential knowledge for paupers is Ofsted’s – “the best that has been ...
11 January 2021
I still can’t do enough penance. I should have been burned in the last circle of hell. She never quite forgave me...
27 October 2020
No good teacher ever preaches, especially English teachers. We deal in ambiguity, complexity, beauty, not brute certainty – in some kind of truth. But these days, as Gramsci said, “to tell the truth ...
2 September 2020
This initiative is bone-stupid, philistine, condescending, insulting. Who are these “respondents”, these blockheads, who wouldn’t know a poem if it bit them in the bum? Ian Whitwham on Ofqual's plan ...
15 June 2020
'There was a ship!!!' – I’d shriek in a borderline psychotic voice, somewhere between full tilt Johnny Rotten and Laurence Olivier’s Richard III. I scared the tinies witless. Ian Whitwham on teaching ...
16 April 2020
When this dread plague ever ends, there is surely a chance to have a tectonic shift in education like we had at the end of the Second World War...
5 March 2020
Hopefully there will always be some pupils who will resist this conformity. Even at my crusty old grammar school, there were always some wags who managed to sabotage things – like the enormous whole ...
5 February 2020
Dominic Cummings is holding sway – and Mr Watermelon Piccaninny Letter Box has stormed it. Dear me, couldn’t we even beat this lot of chancers? Well, no.
25 January 2020
There seemed to be only two cultures. High, White, posh and patrician. Good. And the rest. Bad. I was force-fed the former for years ‘til it came out of my ears
6 November 2019
Roxana wanders the Halloween night. She can’t avoid passing through an ill-lit subterranean car park. Boys in grey hoods on baby bikes – more ugly victims of the rancid public discourse – threaten ...
9 October 2019
We must be trusted. We must be allowed to teach like nobody’s watching. Maybe we’ve reached some kind of tipping point, maybe there’s nothing more to lose – maybe we can reclaim our classrooms...
11 September 2019
Blazers can be £100 a time. Dear me. Poor children are being “rolled out” before they are “rolled in”, “disappeared” on arrival...
1 July 2019
This once prince of subjects has been eviscerated. Creativity and critical thinking have been junked. Language is rarely subjected to ferocious and forensic examination. At what cost?
14 June 2019
The class drifted past my still form. Daisy asked about the homework, but rigor mortis had set in.
8 May 2019
Story-telling is just about the most important thing you can ever do in English. It cuts across class, language, culture and even literacy. Children always want to hear (or tell) a good story. They ...
3 April 2019
They should have been scrapped in 1945. The Labour government had the chance, but bottled it. They couldn’t take on the English ruling class. No-one can
20 March 2019
At first I took them on. Have you even read it? Why should we do what God says? When is obedience a good idea? Certainties are toxic. Complexities aren’t. We need doubt, we need humour. You burn ...
13 March 2019
For girls it was marginally worse. Those with pushy parents went to something called a Lucy Clayton Finishing School. There they got finished. They practised enunciating “how now brown cow” with a ...
6 March 2019
He cites such things as “meaningless words”, “verbal false limbs”, “dying metaphors”, “exhausted idioms” and the sheer “lying”, consciously or not, of so much political speech
27 February 2019
The Cuban Missile Crisis. October 1962. We protested and refused to kick off in case the world was blown to smithereens. It wasn’t. Our protest might have been decisive.
6 February 2019
Like all grand daughters, she is raving genius. Like all four-year-olds she is a poet. It can’t be stopped. I hope it doesn’t get stopped when she starts school, that it’s not blocked by the dread ...
30 January 2019
“I want everyone to see us as a force for improvement,” says Amanda Spielman. Hurrah! Though careful with the language, please, less of the “force”...
23 January 2019
Couldn’t this also be a way dealing with the current retention and recruitment crisis, of keeping us vertical and not horizontal in the classroom?
16 January 2019
She smiles ruefully at his fabulous fibs. He does more anguished sighing. “Please Miss, can I be excused the mockeries.”
9 January 2019
Have you seen the new one? It’s called “Every Lesson Shapes a Life”. It’s slick, nicely cut and seductive. A girl walks down a cunningly lit school corridor passing through the various stages of her ...