Nov 06
I have just returned from the Independent Schools’ Show in Battersea, London, where I was speaking in the morning on the subject of ‘The benefits of single-sex education’. In the afternoon, I was on a ‘MyDaughter’ panel of Heads of girls’ schools, chaired by Sarah Ebner of Schoolgate, so I had a double dose of …
Nov 01
Before I travelled to Bangladesh, I knew that child marriage had been identified as a key issue in the country. According to UNICEF’s 2011 State of the World’s Children report, about a third of women in Bangladesh aged 20-24 are married by the age of 15, and 66% of girls will wed before their 18th …
Oct 30
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 …
Oct 23
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 …