Tim Worstall

The son of a Chinese government official was jailed yesterday for trying to bribe a British university professor with £5,000 to pass his degree. Yang Li also took an imitation firearm into the meeting with the don and another senior academic at Bath University. A court heard that Li, 26, was studying a masters degree [...]

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This is great fun. All is well in our schools because: I was assigned to Chris Brolly, a Teach First-er in his third year. His 12- and 13-year-olds have been inventing a product – bottled water – and it’s my task to help them write a press release. Can they create their own USP, write [...]

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Nick Clegg has signalled that he may send his eldest son to a private school, potentially sparking controversy about his commitment to state education. The Deputy Prime Minister said he would put his children’s education first and would not overrule the wishes of his wife or son for ‘political reasons’.

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Ethnic minority students ‘forced into medicine and law’ Teenagers from ethnic minority families are coming under excessive pressure from parents to push for medicine and law degrees at top universities, the Government’s higher education access tsar has warned. Blimey. That certain minorities push children into the professions. Such a shocker isn’t it? Never mind that [...]

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So what? There are no votes in this issue. Few care. Yet this is one of the fastest-growing components of the British workforce. More than 11% of thirtysomethings hold some form of postgraduate degree, increasingly imperative if you want to build a career in anything from the media through medicine to hi-tech business. There is [...]

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School leavers will be encouraged to skip university and train for highly-paid jobs as lawyers, bankers and accountants in a new wave of “professional” apprenticeships, a minister discloses today. Hasn’t this always been true? Certainly, you used to be able to do articles as a trainee solicitor or accountant without having a degree. So what’s [...]

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Students now can’t even afford to go to a demo student-demo Barbara Ellen: Could the low turn-out be anything to do with the terrible state of the student grant system? Students are now paying for their education. The idea that this is a problem, that they prefer to get educated to shouting in the streets [...]

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OK, so I haven’t actually done this test. But I know how I’d do each of the questions with pen and paper, or with mental arithmetic. Most of it’s pretty simple. And percentages are easy to anyone who has ever worked as a waiter (calculating that tip!). Except for questions 13 and 14. Haven’t a [...]

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Indeed. If you let the congressional majority do dynamic scoring, then because each successive majority builds its own assumptions about what is good for the economy into its model-building, you get a strong drift over time toward larger and larger deficits. The ban on dynamic scoring is a way of eliminating that destructive dynamic. The [...]

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Union boss: Coalition free schools ‘risk fuelling fascism’ A teaching union leader was criticised today after claiming that Coalition education reforms risked fuelling “organised fascist activities” in schools. And why not? There’s certainly nothing stopping people from teaching the little darlin’s about the joys of communism, that other murderous ideology of the 20 th century, [...]

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Suppose Oxford and Cambridge were to ask every state school to identify, at 15, its brightest pupils academically (one, two or three, depending on size). Suppose those pupils were given every possible support and guidance in A-level subject choice and teaching. Suppose they were invited annually to week-long summer schools where they could form their [...]

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Around one-in-20 students is being put off university by annual tuition fees of up to £9,000, according to a major report published today. Even if the effect is a little weak. A personal opinion is that we’re over universitying the kiddies by about 50-75%. So perhaps a further rise in fees is desirable? Will Hutton, [...]

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With so many not-for-profit organisations willing to get involved in running schools in England, the IPPR says there are “no innovation grounds” for allowing for-profit schools. Innovation is coming up with new ways to do things. Since we don’t know what those new ways to do things are yet, because they’re new ways to do [...]

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see more ICHC After Dark There are places where I think this could work very well.

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So this bloke is bad enough that he’s been banned from teaching to protect the children. Members of the council were told that problems went back to 2003 and – despite intensive help and support from the school and local authority – little improvement had been made. And it’s been going on for 9 years. [...]

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Those who run it are not educated: Pupils can choose from at least two meals every day. They pay £2 for two courses and this could be a starter and a main or a main and a desert. As cjcjc pointed out, I’ll have the Kalahari instead of the Apple Pie.

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And yet our govt wants kids to be mistaught a foreign language from the age of seven. ( Yes mistaught – as in most primary schools none of the teachers can speak any foreign language, yet alone teach it to the whole school. ) This is one of Gove’s worse ideas. I’m afraid that I [...]

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As a result of such nepotism, the Department of Economics at the University of Bari had, at one point, eight professors who shared the same last name: Massari. They were all related. Apparently this set a new record for Italy; the previous record was six family members in the same department or institution.

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Almost six-in-10 teachers reported encountering pupils who are left hungry through lack of food at least once a week, it was revealed. OK, a problem. Research by the union also found that many teachers have seen a rise in the number of children on free meals at their school. So it’s a problem we’ve already [...]

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Hmm. The numbers of pupils in comprehensive schools has steadily increased since the mid-1960s and in that period standards have risen continuously. Around six times as many pupils get five good GCSEs as did in 1968. Given that GCSEs were introduced in 1988 (1986 they started being taught, ’88 was first examination year) I find [...]

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