What’s been in the news just lately?
- BBC investigation finds one school had five staffed isolation rooms, costing more than £170,000 per year.
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Children often don’t know what they’re signing up to when they join Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp or Instagram. So the Children’s Commissioner has worked with lawyers to create simplified versions of Terms and Conditions for the most popular social media platforms.
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Schools should not attempt to diagnose children with mental health disorders, says Tom Bennett. He told The Daily Telegraph,
If teachers try to be amateur diagnosticians, they can lead children to believe that their symptoms are something more serious. You can exacerbate stress by making people worry about it.
- And here is the much-awaited Multiplication tables check assessment framework which gives Y4 children 6 seconds to respond.
- A systematic review published in Review of Education looks at the evidence from randomised controlled trials of the effectiveness of interventions for children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in school settings. Thanks to Best Evidence in Brief.
- The Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health say there needs to be a “clear statement” that LGBT people and relationships are part of the teaching of healthy relationships. Dr Max Davie, the college’s officer for health promotion, said to The Daily Telegraph,
This is about giving things their proper names and demystifiying them. There is nothing mysterious or shameful about it, it’s not about promoting LGBT as superior to anything else, it’s just setting out the facts.
- If teachers want to have high status they should work in classrooms in China, Malaysia or Taiwan, according to research from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the Varkey Foundation because these are the countries where teaching is held in the highest public esteem. Brazil, Israel and Italy featured at the lower end of the Teacher Status Index.
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Can 20 minutes a day of story activities help parents boost their children’s language skills? Find out more from the Education Endowment Foundation.
- Drug gangs are targeting private school children “because they are less likely to raise suspicion” Ofsted chief says.
- Effective learning is often not enjoyable. Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren, Lead Economist at CfEE and Affiliated Researcher at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, says policy makers need to be aware of an “achievement/happiness trade-off” in education.
- Take a look at Cognitive load theory in practice from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation.
- There’s a special short edition of CollectiveED working papers relevant to mentoring and coaching with thinkpieces from Professor Rachel Lofthouse right here.