Cuba used three major methods to revolutionise its education system from the 1960s. The hard work has paid off and the system holds many lessons for other countries.
The shockwaves from the latest round of school league tables are still reverberating across staff rooms up and down the country. The headlines have been about a drop in the proportion of pupils achieving…
For most governments, it’s their platform of education reforms that is politically one of the hardest programmes to push through. Yet push it through they do, in what has become a constant effort by politicians…
Only a tenth of education reforms carried out around the world since 2008 have been analysed by governments for the impact they have on children’s education. A new report by the Organisation for Economic…
The teachers of tomorrow should be eager to prepare for “your future, their future”, according to the National College for Teaching and Leadership’s new teacher-training recruitment campaign. Sadly they…
It is no secret that children of East Asian heritage excel at school. In England, for example, 78% of ethnic Chinese children obtain at least 5 A* to C GCSE grades, compared to a national average of just…
Students collecting their GCSE results this summer will now be obliged to participate in education and training until at least the end of the academic year in which they turn 17. From the summer of 2015…
This year’s GCSE results day is predicted to be “chaos” if recent exam reforms cause large fluctuations in students’ grades. Exam boards, teachers and teacher unions are talking of “nervousness”, “turbulence…
David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle has been substantial. Nowhere more so than in education, where both the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, and the minister responsible for universities and…
In what must surely be seen as a significant demotion, secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, has been moved to become chief whip in David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle. Given he is such a big fan…
“PISA shock” is the term that has been coined for the sense of political crisis and knee-jerk policy reaction that typically occurs when a country drops in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…
Chile’s newly re-elected president Michelle Bachelet has announced a radical set of educational reforms that are set to review the country’s market-based approach to primary and secondary education. Bachelet’s…
Tonight’s budget will produce few surprises for education funding. The deregulation of university fees, increased support for independent public schools, re-prioritised research funding and a commitment…
In the past, when infections were the dominant form of disease and death, and humans didn’t understand how they spread, an epidemic ended when enough people had died that there were no more potential victims…