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Top graduates will be attracted into the teaching profession to help drive up standards in schools.
Despite having many excellent teachers, trained in some of the best institutions in the world, other nations are racing ahead in school improvement. The Government plans to raise the status of the profession, in the bid to make it a highly attractive career for top graduates. There has also been a longstanding problem recruiting the high quality maths and science teachers.
The proposals cover:
- Offering high quality graduates significantly better financial incentives to train as teachers.
- Offering financial incentives to all trainees with at least a 2.2 so that teacher training continues to be attractive to graduates with excellent subject knowledge.
- Requiring all trainees to have high standards of mathematics and English by requiring trainees to pass a tougher literacy and numeracy tests before they start training.
- Allowing and encouraging schools to lead their own high quality initial teacher training in partnership with a university.
- Giving schools, as prospective employers, a stronger influence over the content of ITT training as well as the recruitment and selection of trainees.
- Continuing to subject ITT provision to quality controls that focus on the quality of placements and selection.
Source
26 April 2014
"The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity." George Bernard Shaw (1856?1950)
26 April 2014
Four schools and one college sent more students to Oxbridge over three years than 2000 schools and colleges across the UK, according to a report on university admissions by the Sutton Trust.
Between them, Westminster School, Eton College, Hills Road Sixth Form College, St Pauls School and St Pauls Girls School produced 946 Oxbridge entrants over the period 2007-2009 ? accounting for over one in 20 of all Oxbridge admissions. Meanwhile just under 2000 schools and colleges with less than one Oxbridge entrant a year produced a total of 927 Oxbridge entrants.
These figures are driven primarily by differences in the A-level results, but the study also shows different success rates for schools with similar average examination results.
Source
26 April 2014
A groundbreaking agreement outlining how the UK and China will work together to boost vocational learning in both countries has been announced.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed during an official visit to Beijing, China, by Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning Minister John Hayes.
The five key areas of activity will be:
- Trials of apprenticeships in China drawing on UK models and expertise.
- Expanding the mutual recognition of qualifications and vocational education providers.
- Support for institutional partnerships including joint course development and student/teacher exchanges.
- Joint development of e-learning and remote learning facilities.
- Sector specialists from the UK and China working together to develop curriculum material and training resources.
Source
26 April 2014
Four studies suggest that searching for information on the Internet decreases our recall of the information but enhances our recall of where to access it.
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger.
No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can Google the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue.
When faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers as a solution and expect to have future access to information they find.
The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.
If these arguments seem familiar, it may be because Plato reported that Socrates said exactly the same thing about writing:
Socrates lived relatively shortly after the invention of the Greek alphabet and the widespread adoption of writing.
...for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners? souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
Writing is still with us.
Source
26 April 2014
A symbol that is thought to be the world?s earliest question mark has been identified by a Cambridge academic.
The symbol is two dots, one above the other, similar in appearance to a colon, rather than the familiar squiggle of the modern question mark. The double-dot symbol appears in Syriac manuscripts of the Bible dating back to the fifth century.
The double-dot mark, known to later grammarians as zawga elaya, is written above a word near the start of a sentence to tell the reader that it is a question. It doesn?t appear on all questions: ones with a wh- word don?t need it, just as in English ?Who is it? can only be a question (although we use a question mark anyway). But a question like ?You?re going away?? needs the question mark to be understood; and in Syriac, zawga elaya marks just these otherwise ambiguous expressions.
Source
26 April 2014
Monday 1 August - 1st day of Ramadan. Saturday 6 August - Hiroshima Day; Moon: 1st quarter 11.08 UT.
26 April 2014
Tuesday 9 August - Nagazaki Day. Saturday 13 August - Full Moon 18:57 UT.
26 April 2014
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