Posts under ‘News’

Poverty has a far greater influence on the performance of white British pupils at school than any other ethnic group, according to research published today.

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A 15-year-old maths prodigy is set to become the youngest undergraduate at the University of Cambridge for more than two centuries.
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There are bargains to be had for netbook shoppers on a budget, says Marc Lockley
Last week’s article regarding the Apple MacBook sparked a fiery debate about affordability and the usual battle between Apple and PCs. This week we are balancing the books, looking at a few netbooks which are a fraction of the cost of [...]

England’s first city-wide lottery system aimed at solving the problem of allocating places at over-subscribed schools failed to give poorer children equal access to top schools, academics say.
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Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school
A child’s social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered.
The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve [...]

Middle-class families still dominate best schools despite attempts to close class gap
Middle-class families monopolise the best schools even when a lottery is used to allocate places, according to a study published today.
Lotteries have been seen by some educationists as a way of reducing deep-seated class divisions in the school system. The highest-performing schools tend to [...]

Jamie Wilson is the last of a dying breed – the only young man left working in a state-run nursery school in the country. Figures published yesterday by the General Teaching Council show the 23-year-old from Liverpool is the only male under 25 in England working with under-fives as a state school nursery teacher. They [...]

Arran Fernandez, who hit headlines in 2001 for his mathematical prowess, set to become university’s youngest student since 1773
At 15, most teenagers are struggling to get their heads around the algebra and equations of maths GCSE. Not Arran Fernandez.
Next month, he will become the youngest student at Cambridge University for 237 years – aged 15 [...]

My great-aunt Margaret Way, who has died aged 92, taught speech and drama in Taunton, Somerset, for more than 60 years and was an integral figure in the performing arts community there.
Born in Taunton, she took a three-year course when she left school at 17, and began teaching elocution, speech and drama in 1941. One [...]

Three schools in Telford & Wrekin have applied to convert to academy status which will see them opt out of local authority control.
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