Aug 20
Amongst all the high emotions and press coverage of the A Levels and university entrance last week, a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission slipped right under the radar. This report, entitled ‘Sex and Power’, looked at the number of women in power or influence in Britain in 2010-11, and compared it with …
Aug 18
Today brings news of many fantastic A Level grades, and I congratulate all the Leavers of 2011 from St Mary’s Calne. Nearly 40% of all their grades were A*s, half of them achieved an amazing full marks in one of their papers, and 1 in 5 of them is off to Oxbridge. An ENORMOUS well …
Aug 17
A survey in Yours Magazine, quoted in Monday’s Telegraph, made for sad reading. Teenagers, it said, as are lonely as the elderly because they spend more of their time on social networking websites such as Facebook than they do going out to meet real people and develop real friendships. The survey found that 6 out …
Aug 15
The very last show I watched at the Edinburgh Fringe before heading back south for exam results week was a show for which I had especially extended my stay in Edinburgh by a day. It was the Fringe debut of a group consisting essentially of 2011 leavers from St Mary’s Calne, presenting an adapted version …
Aug 13
Probably the most extraordinary show we saw at the Edinburgh Fringe this year was an incredibly fast-moving extravaganza of electronic music, video projection and light, with a futuristic feel, and an interaction between dancers and projected images that was timed absolutely to perfection. It was billed as a Comedy Show, and there was a light …
Aug 11
On Tuesday I had a conversation with a journalist ahead of the A Level results which come out next week, and we ended up talking about the sexualised imagery of girls and women in our society, which is a subject that I feel very strongly about, and which I have spoken out about several times …
Aug 09
There were appalling scenes of violence again last night in London and other cities around the UK for the third night in a row. And there is no excuse at all for this violence – for all that Ken Livingstone tried to blame the violence on anger generated by government cuts, it is obvious to …
Aug 08
A parent of a girl at my school said to me a few weeks ago that the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning 2009 film ‘An Education’, starring Carey Mulligan, should be compulsory viewing for all teenage girls, and now that I have (finally) seen it, I entirely agree. The film takes us on the journey of a …
Aug 04
A quietly uplifting article about Forest Schools appeared in the pages of this week’s Wednesday’s Times. If you can’t read it online, then do at least look at this website about the phenomenon of Forest Schools – this model of outdoor schools, relatively common in Scandinavia, is being adopted by a number of schools in …
Aug 03
Monday’s front page headlines in both The Sun and The Daily Mail led on a story first published in the previous day’s Sunday Telegraph about the rise in eating disorders in children under 13. The frustration of most articles dealing with figures, facts and medical science is that they tend to obscure the reality with …