It is the images of the children – and especially the girls – which will stay with me forever. Those of you who have been following me on Twitter, or who read my blog last Sunday, will know that I have spent the past week in Bangladesh with the children’s charity Plan, on a trip …
October 2011 archive
Oct 23
Bangladesh calls – embarking on a trip to support Plan UK’s work with children
On Monday I am headed to Gatwick to join the tremendous chief executive of Plan UK, Marie Staunton, on a three day trip to Bangladesh (travelling out on Monday, with full days in Bangladesh on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and travelling back on Friday), to see in practice some of the work that Plan UK …
Oct 20
ParentPort: a way forward to protect our children
It was fantastic last week to see clear action being taken by the Government – as promised – to implement some of the major recommendations of the Bailey Report, ‘Letting Children be Children’, which was published in June. The report described a landscape in which our children are bombarded by sexualised imagery, and content designed …
Oct 17
Why we need to keep up the pressure for women on Boards
It was good to read last week that David Cameron had written to the chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies to remind them of their obligation – recommended in Lord Davies’ report on Women in Boards published last February – to work out how they are going to aim for 25% female representation on …
Oct 14
Private schools with a public purpose
On Monday this week, St Mary’s Calne and the Girls’ Schools Association hosted a seminar in London to discuss the educational hot topic of our time: how independent schools can become more and more involved in the state sector, blurring boundaries which have grown up, and retuning, some would argue, to the original aims of …
Oct 11
Ed Smith, Cricket and Renaissance People
Last week I was in a blustery St Andrew’s for an excellent – bracing, even, in more ways than one! – annual meeting of the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference. Led and organised by the new Chair of HMC, Ken Durham (Headmaster of University School, Hampstead), the conference took as its theme ‘Excellence, not Privilege’, and …
Oct 08
Queen Elizabeth I: a supporter of girls’ schools?
Toward the end of last month, in my capacity as President of the Girls’ Schools Association, I hosted a dinner for around 50 guests at the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn in London. It was a super evening: present were Heads of a number of great girls’ schools, and Heads of a number of great …
Oct 06
What a world-class education really means
One of the other speakers I very much enjoyed listening to at the IAPS conference (see my blog on Sunday) was a teacher from Windlesham House School in West Sussex, a prep school teaching girls and boys up to the age of 13. He was speaking about the partnership that Windlesham has with The CRED …
Oct 04
“Women earn more than men”: should we be excited?
An article in yesterday’s Independent by Richard Garner, the Education Editor, drew attention to the content of this year’s Elizabeth Johnson Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Physics. Betty Johnson, who died in 2003, was a great supporter of women in the sciences, and in her honour, this lecture this year was given by Mary …
Oct 02
How a hijack revealed the immense power of humanity
One of the privileges of being President of the Girls’ Schools Association is being invited to the annual conferences of the other UK Heads’ Associations, and last week I was a guest at the IAPS conference of Prep School Heads, which this year was held in Birmingham. It was a super conference with a stimulating …