A primary school teacher has avoided being barred from teaching following revelations in the press of her sideline as a dominatrix, the TES reports. Faith-Anne Lesbirel, a primary school teacher, was exposed by a tabloid newspaper in 2008 as none other than ‘Mistress Saffron’, a dominatrix offering her services for money online. [Lesbirel] insisted her fetish activities [...]
Begging your A Level teacher for an extension on your coursework can be an uncomfortable experience. Begging your teachers for a tenner so that you can afford the bus to school is probably somewhat more degrading. Tonight the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced the replacement for the EMA. The scheme will cost 180 million, a [...]
Meet Eric. He’s an ordinary schoolboy who lives at 29 Acacia Road. But what most people don’t know about Eric is that he leads something of a double life. For whenever Eric eats a banana, an amazing transformation occurs. You see, Eric is Bananaman. I felt a bit like Eric today, running from my city [...]
First they cut the universities And I did not speak out Because I was not a student or an academic. Then they cut the hospitals And I did not speak out Because I was not infirm, old, or disabled. Then they cut the schools And I did not speak out Because I was not a [...]
Frank Field was recently dubbed the government’s ‘poverty tsar’ after the PM asked him to produce a report on inequality, particularly concerning the effects of childhood development on adult life. Today he came out in favour of a 1950s-style ‘tough love’ approach to parenting as a way to shrink inequalities at school. The remedy for the often [...]
Despite the fact that most of the people who write on this blog are Cambridge grads, we have (rightly, in my view), kept posts about matters Oxbridge to a minimum so far. So with that in mind, I apologise in advance for this post – given that it follows Dave Osler’s post at LibCon on [...]
Some excellent news from Leeds University. Students there have rejected a motion at the referendum which would have mandated their union to oppose lecturers strikes. Earlier this year Leeds UCU organised an extremely impressive campaign in defence of jobs and education, which ultimately won major concessions from their management. Strike action was threatened, with an [...]
BREAKING NEWS – PLEASE REPUBLISH! Earlier this afternoon all staff in the Arts and Education section of Middlesex University received the following email: Dear colleagues, Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche, informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his recommendation’ to close [...]
The whirlwind of cuts facing higher education is one of those things its hard to get your head round. The idea of entire departments, even colleges, closing, is one that few people have totally got to grips with. Richard wrote last week about the issues at King’s. Estimates vary wildly about how much they want [...]
Is it not enough that we choose to lock our children up in institutions for twelve years without exposing them to what is becoming a grave system of Machiavellian management structures? These days people do MBAs in education, so-called “super-heads” are earning in excess of £100k a year, and schools are being transformed into multi-level [...]
