What’s been newsworthy in the world of education?
- What does an intra-union strike look like? Ask the National Education Union. The merger of the National Union of Teacher (NUT) with the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) just isn’t working and employees going on strike against their own union.
- Damian Hinds has announced that children as young as four are to be taught about the perils of social media.
- The summer holidays aren’t something all children look forward to as they can often go hungry.
- The Home Office is providing anti-knife lessons before the summer holidays so young people don’t get sucked into knife crime.
- ‘Children educated by their parents must not be hidden from the authorities’ – read the view from The Guardian.
- Education Select Committee endorses appointment of Dame Martina Milburn as Chair of the Social Mobility Commission.
- Childcare.co.uk, has found that four fifths of parents admitted that they do not follow age restrictions on video games, while a quarter said they do not follow age restrictions on films. MRI scans reveal that addictive video games can have a similar effect on children’s brains as drug abuse or alcoholism.
- According to Department for Education’s (DfE) latest projections, secondary pupil numbers are expected to rise by 14.7 per cent in the next 10 years, meaning there will be another 418,000 children in secondary schools by 2027.
- Sophie Rahman, the headteacher who hired one of the London Bridge terrorist attackers to give after-school classes to primary age children has been banned from the profession after failing to safeguard her pupils.
- “The rise of the celebrity book, particularly, means that authors who might have been more popular are now being overlooked.” Read what Sam Pope has to say about banning best-selling books for children.
- So that they do not waste scarce on unnecessary products, headteachers have told education suppliers ‘let us try before we buy’.
- Thousands of schools are introducing measures to stop families coming to school in their cars because of concerns about pollution. Research shows that if children are exposed to air pollution for a long period of time, it can affect how their lungs develop. According to the British Lung Foundation, it’s estimated that the equivalent of 40,000 early deaths can be linked to breathing in polluted air in the UK. They say we need:
* Clean air zones to be established across the UK in the most polluted places
* A new clean air act that sets legal limits in line with the World Health Organisation’s safe limits
* More monitoring outside schools in polluted places
