I’m a school governor at Burnage Media Arts College. I’m also the Academic Affairs Officer (elect) at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. I have a interest in education at all levels - school, further and higher and this category is for posts related to this.
Before 1997 universities were funded through government taxation, largely because the universities claimed (rightly or wrongly) that they provided a useful public benefit and were spending taxpayers’ money wisely. Successive governments trusted them, and let them get on with the business of providing higher education. The general consensus has been that universities were underfunded, particularly [...]
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Posted in Education, National politics on May 27th, 2008
Another review of the Liberal Democrats’ policy on higher education funding has come up and it’s vital that we maintain our commitment to higher education being accessible to all regardless of background. With an increasingly debt-averse society, it’s clear that the only way to do that is with access to education funded through general taxation.
There’s [...]
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Posted in Education, Student politics on May 7th, 2008
I’ve written a guest article for the University of Manchester Politics Society titled “Winning a free education” - here’s a snippet:
We need a policy which enables campaigners and activists to reach out to less politicised students and allows them to take ownership of the campaign, engaging them and ensuring that even small actions taken are [...]
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Posted in Education on Apr 26th, 2008
I doubt many of my friends at university or other people of a similar age across the country have permanently excluded a child from school. On Monday I took the rather heavy decision to expel a child from the school of which I am a governor. While obviously the details of the case must remain [...]
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Just thought a certain comment our Dear Leader made about education just about sums up how disastrously wrong New Labour’s focus is on this matter. So much for education, education, education. Schools are not meant to be “popular with parents”, they have a duty to the children. But on the other hand, children can’t vote, [...]
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Posted in Education, Student politics on Apr 7th, 2007
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) have an interesting article titled “Whatever happened to student radicalism?“, written by Ben Lewis and Dave Isaacson. While it suffers from the usual “everyone who disagrees with us is right-wing” disease common among socialists and communists, it is worth reading for its analysis of the fractures between the [...]
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This week’s edition of Student Direct features the Islamic Society on its Societies page. The article is written by one Walead Quhill who stood for Life Sciences secretary in the Student Union council elections in 2006, and thankfully he wasn’t elected given he doesn’t seem to accept evolution as a valid scientific theory (or indeed [...]
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Posted in Education, National politics on Sep 27th, 2006
Alan Johnson’s recent announcement to axe maths GCSE coursework and have all other coursework done under strict supervision is a major step backwards. The concept that years and years of study can be compressed into a one-hour exam is not only unfair towards students but it leads to schools teaching how to pass an exam, [...]
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