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It’s possible to portray the relationship that must exist between parents and teachers as a perpetually confrontational one, which is why it’s important to clarify that there are different kinds of issues that come up with children who attend school.

Volumes and volumes of opinion exist as to what gets results in education. A rapid consultation of newspapers, political statements, even discussions with educational professionals, usually results in this list of preferred reforms (in no particular order):

• new head teachers

• new types of schools

• smaller class sizes

• more homework

• more teaching assistants

• more money for schools

But a recent comprehensive study finds that none of these are the key to success.

When teaching 11 to 14 year olds about mediaeval literature like Beowulf or Gawain and the Green Knight, one runs into the enormous barrier of in some cases a thousand years of cultural and linguistic changes which act as an abyss between the modern student and the works.

An independent school shouldn’t lose sight of the practical realities of what it means to be a school: curriculum, timetables, the nitty gritty of teaching and all which that brings. But if it wants to stand out, it needs to be something more than ‘just’ a school. The trick is to powerfully enhance what it is that makes any particular school unique.

Adding value to the educational experience of each and every child, whether in a class setting or not, takes some work initially, but that work saves hours and hours of harder work later on.

The rapid industrialisation of Britain throughout the 19th-century brought about a transformation in the education system: instead of a one-room schoolhouse, education adopted a factory model. Students were treated as products on an assembly line: bluntly put, they were herded into place and then stamped with the knowledge required in order to become more effective economic producers.

Anyone interested in improving their job opportunities, raising their IQs and boosting their success in the education system could achieve all three by focusing on one key area: words.

It’s possible to imagine all data, all ‘bits’ of knowledge, including skills or extended experiences, floating around in space, randomly.

To meet the basic requirements for writing an English Literature essay in a school context, there is surprisingly little really useful guidance. Most students come to the task without any idea of what to do, but approach it as simply something that the school says ‘must be done’. And the truth is that many teachers come to it with the same attitude.

What’s wrong with education today is probably easy to sum up.

Education breaks down whenever its definition of a ‘student’ is incorrect.

We are all pushed and pulled around by our environments. Mainly pulled.

Anyone interested in education in terms of what it really is and what it should be trying to do will probably not need much convincing that it is time to challenge the traditional school model. To do so, though, requires that we ‘think outside the box’ of a traditional school set-up, with its centralised approach, establishing in each local community and providing a hierarchical type of progression through subjects, year-by-year.

Between August 29 and September 10, 2014, survey group YouGov managed a study in the US for Scholastic, a company that for 90 years has been producing quality products aimed at educating, entertaining and motivating children, including books, fairs and resources.

Something that we take for granted, something that you are doing right now, is the process and action of reading.

There is probably a ‘critical mass’ when it comes to traditional education - the kind of schooling that we have all become accustomed to, in which children are divided into classes and are supervised and taught by a single teacher.

In designing a lesson, you are trying to do two basic things:

1. Transmit a knowledge or skill in such a way that it seems like part of the student’s own life

and

2. Surprise the student in such a way that he or she sticks with it until 1 is achieved.

In the Internet Age it’s become commonplace for businesses to view the entire globe as a single giant ‘shop’ through which humanity (or at least those who have internet access) are constantly flowing.

Parenting - probably the most important job of anyone’s life. And yet there is no formal training or real preparation for it. Here are five key tips:

The rapid industrialisation of Britain throughout the 19th-century brought about a transformation in the education system: instead of a one-room schoolhouse, education adopted a factory model.

Earlier in this blog I discussed various formats through which education occurs, in one way or another, for children. Some of these give a great deal of freedom in learning; others are centred on the child; some are based on religious beliefs or cultural ideas.

Imagine a small circle representing a child’s world; then imagine next to it a much larger circle containing the knowledge that human civilisation has accumulated over the millennia.

Now that the education market has started to open up, are you thinking of starting a private school?

It goes without saying that it’s a challenging process.

Education wasn’t always delivered in the way to which we have become accustomed today.

The success of education has to do with the way in which educators present and communicate knowledge of the world to young people. In each lesson, of course, the balance between progressing through a body of knowledge and the engagement of the student with that knowledge is vital.

English is the third most common native language in the world, is widely learned as a second language and is an official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other world and regional international organisations. Your children’s future is made brighter and opportunities open up if English is known and used fluently by them. This isn't necessarily something you can or should leave to chance.

Right now, if you’re a teacher, you probably have a set of lesson plans or schemes of work or curriculum targets or ideas with which are already working to some degree, with no changes, tweaks, modifications or adaptations of any kind. 

What’s wrong with education today is probably easy to sum up.

Education breaks down whenever its definition of a ‘student’ is incorrect.

Particularly as children get older, some subjects arise that need to be tackled properly and confidently in order to avoid trouble later. These things are addressed in schools, but not always in ways that are comfortable for the individual child or which answer all his or her questions. It’s up to the parent, really, to do a full job with these topics. Here are some tips on how to go about it.

Teenagers entering their final years of schooling are often confronted with statements outlining the extreme importance of doing well at this stage in their lives - and this comes when they have very little grasp of the context of what is being said, having not lived all that long. Here are some key things you can try to do to support them during this potentially stressful period:

It’s all very well starting off on the right foot with children and teenagers, getting communication flowing, setting up spaces, establishing a few key rules and so forth -but what tends to happen over time is that these things erode and things can become fraught again. These tips will help you to stay on top of things and persevere with workable ways of dealing with situations.

Bringing up a teenager in the family can be tricky. You want to love, protect and nurture them while at the same time encouraging them to become an adult and to have their own lives outside the family. There are some approaches that are more workable than others.

Elsewhere we’ve written about helping children to read. This is so important and such a building block for future success, that these further tips have been put together to support you even more in this area.

There are many ways of creating lessons, and many ways of thinking about creating lessons. Some are more workable than others. Here is a simple - but analogy-strewn! - procedure that may help you to cut through some of the complexity that sometimes enters into this.

When teaching English Literature to teenagers, a common practice in schools from the time when I was at school myself (and probably for many years before that) is to ‘do’ a novel by having the students in the class take turns to read sections aloud to the whole class. As a teacher, I never found this workable. In fact, quite the opposite: it is usually quite destructive to what you are trying to accomplish.

An independent school is in an unusual position in that its ‘customers’ (the people who pay the money for a service) are the parents, but its ‘consumers’ (the people who actually receive the service) are their children. 

Education and aesthetics are bound together in mysterious ways, it seems.

Almost every student is taught that an essay has to have an Introduction, followed by the Body of the essay, and then concluded with... well, a conclusion. 

At some point in teaching teenagers, usually just before or soon after you have entered the dreaded ’S’ subject (Shakespeare), someone in the class will wearily throw out this question: ‘What’s the point?’

Of course there is no one definitive way to teach anything, but this advice is based on the experience of over fifteen years of teaching teenagers literature, and about ten years teaching them about this particular play.