When Russia invaded Ukraine, a common refrain in the media was that it was the first war in Europe since the Second World War. This carelessly discounted the deaths of hundreds of thousands during the collapse of the Yugoslavia in the 1990s including the genocide against 8,000 Bosnian men and…

We are on the fourth education secretary of 2022, but one feature of our schools persists: the narrow education schools provide students. The impoverished conception of education is not primarily the fault of schools but the wider societal context in which they operate. Michael Sandel in the Tyranny of Merit…

This article is part of a project I am undertaking: Around the World in 80 Schools. Get in touch for further details. In a capital of such cultural and historical esteem as Athens, visiting sacred sites like the Acropolis is obligatory. But appreciation is partly dependent on background knowledge. While…

Black History Month has come to an end. The month, having been imported from the USA, started in the UK in 1987 in part in response to the narrow history that was taught in schools and the lack of wider public awareness about the contribution of black people to British…

Does mediocre and jarring service matter? I could get over the pang of irritation at being kettled at Stansted Airport railway station, where, despite passengers now focusing on their journey’s next leg, over-zealous inspectors were in full steam. The queue tail lengthened, the irritability rose, as between narrow barriers, inspectors…

Usually in Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, a flagship programme discussing the big questions and the big issues of the day, there is disagreement among the panellists and ‘expert witnesses’. Usually the host, Michael Buerk, embodies the traditional role of neutrality from the chair. But for its recent episode on…

A teacher is in hiding for his own safety, away from his family home, due to showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad that was a routine part of the school’s Year 9 Religious Education curriculum that discussed blasphemy (the mainstream interpretation within Islam is that it is forbidden to…

Over the course of the pandemic, the suspect regard for teachers and the teaching profession is a consistent trend in the public debates about education. Where public sector workers in healthcare are rightly being cherished, the same credit has not been extended to educators. Where teachers share concerns about teaching…

A recent column in the Financial Times highlighted that books that have not been newly published are making up an increasing percentage of the market share of book sales. The onslaught of lists containing ‘the best books of 2020’ was underway from the start of the month. …