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Guardian readersHappy birthday to us, happy birthday to us…
Guardian Students turns one - and we're dishing out presents to celebrate
Guardian Students celebrates our first birthday tomorrow! Since we launched the site on 22 May last year:
• a student protest march fizzled out at a rainy rally where the NUS president was pelted with eggs
• student activism staged a dramatic recovery thanks to a plucky occupation by Sussex students protesting against privatisation
• girls became a third more likely than boys to go to university
• a student union employee posted film of a couple having sex at a ball all over the internet
• and students filmed each other pouring milk on their heads
We've been busy too, and throughout the day tomorrow we'll be highlighting some of our best bits in a live blog on the Guardian Students site. If you've written for us, keep your eyes peeled: you may feature in our Best of the Blogs.
Rebecca Ratcliffe has interviewed the new leader of the NUS Toni Pearce – and discovered that she's the first president never to have got a university degree. More revelations tomorrow...
But birthdays, let's face it, are all about presents. And we've got heaps to hand out to anyone who has signed up for membership since the very beginning. So take a moment's break from your revision to fill in this little form right now, and you'll be eligible for our prize draws on the hour on Wednesday from 10am-5pm. Easy as that, no multiple choice, no essay questions – just sit back and wait to see if you win one of dozens of really rather marvellous things:
Clothing vouchers from Topshop, Topman and Figleaves, Amazon vouchers from Coventry University, books galore courtesy of our colleagues on Guardian Books, a free haircut from Jones and Payne, goodies from Noisey, the music channel of Vice, subsriptions to the NME, Cath Kidson vouchers, trips to Alton Towers for you and all your mates and, wait for it, an iPad Mini.
Being one is brilliant! We're toddling off to crash-land face-first in our birthday cake.
Judy FriedbergRebecca Ratcliffeguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Teenager predicted a 'D' scores top marks in A-Level paper
The wonderfully weird world of webcomics | Dean Burnett
Webcomics are a popular, diverse and increasingly widespread format that most people are blissfully unaware. To address this, an interview was conducted with the team behind the popular UK-based webcomic Exterminatus Now
Webcomics are increasingly widespread and popular. It could be argued their proliferation is linked to the decline of print comics, in the same way that free news site and blogging is often blamed for the decline in newspapers. Webcomics don't get nearly as much mainstream publicity though (at least none that I've seen). Even the more popular examples like XKCD seemingly go largely unmentioned in other media formats, despite their considerable success.
Webcomics are interesting from a scientific perspective. They rely on both new and ancient technology (the internet and drawing, respectively) being fused seamlessly. They seem to be based on established rules and systems that appear to be the result of a bottom-up organisation, the result of numerous individuals contributing and responding to the responses obtained, rather than some structure put in place by some unspecified authority; a sort of "emergent system", if you will, only not as profound. It's enough to shoehorn this into the Guardian science section, at least
I could be wrong about all this; I'm not involved in webcomics at all. So, like any good scientist, I thought I'd investigate. To this end, I got in touch with the authors/artists/web gurus behind my personal favourite webcomic, Exterminatus Now.
For a detailed background on how it all came about, read this interview here. But in brief, Exterminatus Now is a webcomic about a four-man team of "Men in Black" in the Inquisition: a secretive international organisation who are responsible for policing and combating the constant attempts by occult forces to enslave society. It's a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, video games, wargaming, action movies and sitcom. Also there's swearing.
And every character is an anthropomorphic animal. I probably should have mentioned that first, if anything.
It's the work of Garry Webber, Alan Graham, Stuart Edney and Martin Faulkner, or as they're known in the comic, Lothar (homicidal cyborg echidna), Virus (bookish rat), Eastwood (boorish silver fox) and Rogue (arrogant ninja cat) respectively.
Here's how it works. Sort of.
It seems there's 4 of you responsible for the webcomic. Who does what, exactly?
Garry: We mostly all share in the writing duties. In the early days of the comic I was probably the most prolific writer. Today it's far more even, we constantly bounce ideas off each other. We all look after our forum as well. Alan does the art but there have been times and surely will be again where Martin has drawn the comic, though presently his time seems to be spent maintaining/designing the site.
What's the connection between the characters and you guys? Is it that they're named after you, based on you, inspired by you? It seems like the opposite of a writer publishing under a pseudonym, where you have clearly fictional characters that are meant to be "you". What's the deal there, basically.
Alan: The webcomic self-insert is an odd convention. When we started out, a lot of webcomics were "two guys on a couch" style, where the characters were literally caricatures of the authors, hanging out talking about video games. Even non-autobiographical comics in more fantastic settings would often have characters who were clearly meant to represent the author. We also came out of the online forum scene, the user's handles, signatures and avatar pics were often used to create characters that were imagined to convene in cyberspace. These two influences meant that when we started, it just seemed natural to have the main characters be our forum handles.
Garry: For myself, Alan, and Stuart, our characters are "us" in a small way, taking our funniest/worst traits and amplifying them. Take Lothar for example. During the comics early days I was a typical 18 year old internet user, i.e. full of self importance, righteous indignation, along with a smattering of being as dumb as a post. Lothar kind of typifies that "Internet Tough Guy" persona I put out there. It's definitely less true these days, mostly thanks to my wife putting up with me and making me calm down, but there is definitely a lot of my younger, more embarrassing self in there. Rogue is a different matter, an existing character of Martin's who is nothing like him aside from proficiency in martial arts.
Martin: As Alan says, forum culture around the time lent itself to building a character around ones username. Thing was, I'd taken my forum handle from a project I'd been working on before I met these guys, and associated myself with a character for that project. Rogue was made for some of EN's pre-existing material, and got used because he shared enough physical design traits with my existing character (Silversword) to act like a surrogate version, but was never conceived with the same over-exaggeration of our worst traits.
A lot of fiction these days presents worlds where magic and technology mesh, but you guys really take it to another level (angel-powered computer cores, various machine-Gods etc.). Do you have actual technical backgrounds/expertise, or is this a case of knowing the right words to use?
Stuart: I've read far too much pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, so I've gotten the feel for it over the years. My proudest moment was one comic that came to me marked "words words words" on the script Garry had, and it ended up with a full page of technobabble. I found it funny. No-one else did. But I'm about as technically-minded as anyone schooled in the humanities instead of the sciences, which is to say not. I am, however, a good bullshitter.
Garry: Indeed, a good example of such is issue #322, written by Stuart. It's all techno-babble fluff, but he manages to make it at least sound somewhat convincing
From inception to launch, is it possible to say how long a typical episode takes? Even a quick, short blog takes me a few hours, lord knows how long it must take you guys.
Garry: It really depends on the bolt of inspiration.. A lot of the times comics come from a conversation we have and can get written in near complete form within half an hour.
Alan: An artist as plodding and ponderous as me really has no business doing a regularly updated comic. A typical strip takes Too Damn Long.
Martin: It's the drawing that takes the most time - if even our shorter 8 or 12 page storylines take a few months to actually make it to web, you can see how easy it is for us to build up quite a backlog any time one of us writes something.
How do you differ from the big print comics, your DCs and Marvels? I'd imagine you don't have to deal with the problems they have (market demographics, constantly changing writers/artists, questionable reboots to consolidate decades long back stories and contexts, stuff like that), but are there any particular issues that plague webcomics?
Alan: It's funny, we do actually have a decade long back story now. And those early strips do feel quite rough and in need of reboot. That's one of the pitfalls: being a complete amateur when starting out. I feel like we grew into something to be proud of, but those first couple years, in hindsight? Tough to look at.
Garry: I think schedule slippage can be a bit more detrimental to a webcomic than print, especially for people who make a living out of their work. If you don't provide new content on a regular basis, you will lose readers and then your source of income. We do it for fun and have recently started selling T-Shirts, but we're not big enough for us to be able to do that yet. A lot of webcomics die simply due to lack of updates, sometimes for good reasons and bad.
Stuart: Occasionally Hellboy and Atomic Robo. I find most superhero comics to be soap operas for nerds (says the nerd). I nick most of my ideas from other places.
Martin: Print comics are meant to be read very quickly. A page with very little on it is fine when the next page is already right next to it, but webcomics have to take into account their update schedule. We do a lot of work to make sure each page packs a lot of punch, both in terms of humour and story development.
I've seen mention of you having a following among the Furry communities. Given that the comic is based in a world of anthropomorphic animals, this makes sense, but do you find you have followings or fans among certain communities or groups?
Alan: Curiously, we have a small, but visible Russian contingent. A majority of our readers are from English-speaking countries, obviously. But a .ru site frequently appears in our top referring URLs, and a handful of Slavic speakers frequent our comment sections. There's even been an attempt by fans to translate the comic into Russian.
Garry: I've also found we have a few fans in military service, at least the US and UK. We previously had application on the site that showed us where in the world our fans were, and we had a few in surprising parts of the world, including one in Israel who kept coming every week. Kinda makes me feel happy that we get people all around the world come and read our work.
Martin: The comments section, our forum - those show me some level of our demographic, but I'm never quite certain how the readership at large spreads
Do you deal much with other webcomics? I've seen mention of conferences and the like, but this is a community completely alien to me.
Alan: We're pretty insular, unfortunately. I'm wont to go off drawing and not get back to even my co-authors for days or weeks, let alone stay in touch with other creators. If a strip appears on the site, the guys assume I'm still alive.
Garry: We sometimes have interaction with other authors online, such as Alan Forman of PoisonedMinds.com, but aside from that, not really. I think the most successful collaboration is that of the "Big Three" webcomics creators. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny-Arcade.com, Scott Kurtz of PVPonline.com and Kris Straub of ChainsawSuit.com (among others). These guys all started out separately and now all work in the same building in Seattle.
Stuart: I read a fair few, but as far as I know the webcomic community is primarily a North American one, so I tend not to dabble with it.
Martin: We tend to do our own thing. Certainly we all read other webcomics, and it's not unheard of for webcomics to reference and cameo each other regularly, or set up little rings of cross readership. At least one group set themselves up an entire publishing label to work under. Conventions, particularly, are a big thing across the states and Canada for webcomics artists to communicate with each other and their fans, and it's only been since Alan moved to Canada that we've actually found it feasible to try being a part of that ourselves.
So there you have it. Exterminatus Now, go read it and be one of the cool kids. If not that, then some other webcomic.
Dean Burnett's onlne creativity barely covers this blog and his Twitter account, @garwboy
Exterminatus Now is updated approximately every Tuesday.
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10 ways to deal with low-level disruption in the classroom
Whether it's passing notes or tapping a pen, low-level disruption is a challenge in many schools. Tracey Lawrence offers some strategies to help
Lately, the most effective professional development I have undertaken has been free and extremely valuable. It has taken place on Twitter, every Monday night during term from 8 to 8.30pm on the #Behaviourchat hashtag. Often, advice given during these sessions looks at violent pupils or more extreme behaviour; however, it can be the low-level disruptions that can have a high impact on the learning atmosphere within your classroom. We have all experienced low-level disruption in class; chair rocking, humming, pen tapping, note passing. Just disruptive enough to slow the pace of your lesson but not dramatic enough to draw it to a halt.
During a recent Monday night slot of behaviour chat, a variety of professionals, including teaching professionals, learning support assistants and consultants, devised some tips to deal with low level disruptions. Here's a summary of them.
Adjust the volume
With loud classes, avoid raising your voice. It only increases the noise. Lowering your voice can be much more effective. If the volume of your voice is always high, it loses its effect and doesn't help to control the situation.
Move around
Your presence is extremely powerful. Don't stay stagnant at the front of your class. Move around and don't allow the children to become distracted. Talk to them about their task. Give them deadlines. For example say: "I'd love to see two more ideas by the time I come back as your ideas are really interesting." Then walk and visit another child/pair but make sure you come back.
Shut out negativity
Don't allow negativity to enter your classroom. If a child isn't ready to come in, stop them and provide a distraction. Allow the child to calm down so that they can enter in a calmer frame of mind.
Be prepared
This one is a basic one but doesn't always happen. Prepare your resources before you start teaching. It allows you to challenge the children's energy as much as you can. Rustling papers and setting out resources while children wait only encourages low-level disruptions and sets the mood for the lesson.
It's your classroom
Control your space. You are the decisive element in your classroom. Stand at the door as they enter. Talk, change moods. Say hello to the children regardless of whether you have their eye contact or not. Always say goodbye.
Keep calm
Have a calm outlook. If you can't leave the room but are getting annoyed, flick through your assessing pupil progress (APP) sheets or walk away from the situation to calm yourself down before returning.
Don't deviate from teaching
There is no need for an excessive response to low-level disruption. Don't interrupt your teaching to deal with it. It can be corrected by including the child's name into your explanation, a look or a signal of some sort.
Be positive
Deal with low-level disruptions by using positive language. "We sit in our chairs so that our handwriting is beautiful." It doesn't give the child the opportunity to opt out but also sets the expectation.
Share your expectations
Don't assume children understand what your version of acceptable is. Tapping, shouting, and throwing could be acceptable at home. A child needs to have reinforcement of your expectations.
Have a routine
Having a routine in your classroom can help. Children can be uneasy when they do not know what is going to happen in the day. Children need to feel secure in their classroom and with their activities. They like to know what is coming up in their day so if things are going to change give them warning that something different will be happening and explain what to expect.
All of these tips are not guaranteed to work. But having said that they are all tried and tested ideas from someone else's classroom. Try them, amend them, adapt them and make a comment to let us know of any other methods that have helped your with low level behaviours.
Tracey Lawrence is a primary school teacher and a specialist leader in education (SLE) with a focus on behaviour and attendance.
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Slash education budget by a fifth, says think-tank
England to sever ties with Wales and Northern Ireland over GCSEs
Letters: Mr Gove, please listen to teachers
The secretary of state for education is pressing on doggedly with his proposals for the reform of education at all levels. This is in the face of opposition of the major headteachers' unions and representative associations throughout the maintained and independent sectors (ASCL, ISC, GSA and HMC). And all the admissions tutors of Cambridge University. At the weekend the NAHT expressed clearly what many teachers and headteachers think (Report, 18 May). The lack of respect for our professional expertise and long experience is breathtaking and will win no one to the cause. Indeed, it is a strategy no good teacher would ever use to alter the mindset of an apparently troublesome student. Conflict breeds conflict and, before long, contempt.
There is no hunger for many of these reforms. Parents and students are not baying for them. Teachers oppose them as retrograde steps in many cases. Too much change at too many levels is a recipe for chaos for the next decade. And at A-level – to name but one area – we risk undoing the progress since 2000 towards greater breadth and flexibility in the two years of study. Am I alone in thinking that cost-cutting may be just as important in these developments as any altruism apparently tilted at standards?
No good teacher I have ever met was against rigour. If it has been lost, by all means reintroduce it – but with teachers on side and not embattled by long lists of implied failings. Above all, Mr Gove, please just listen to those closest to the country's young people. You will find us open to constructive dialogue. But deeply resistant to endless, destructive – and undeserved – criticism.
Alice Phillips
Head, St Catherine's, Bramley; president-elect of the Girls' Schools Association
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Academy chains decide where children go to school
What can you do if you are told your child must move to a different school eight miles away? Not a lot, it seems, if the school is part of an academy chain
Janet May says she speaks for her entire village as she vents her frustration. "The word I would use to describe my feelings now is desperate. As a group we are incredibly sad and angry, but we also feel powerless in the face of the refusal of the academy trust to engage with us. Their whole attitude has been one of contempt.
"They say they have listened to us. But they have not: they have not grasped the anger and frustration of this entire community."
May, who lives in the picturesque Devon village of Lapford, is at the forefront of a dispute which critics say illustrates the power the government has given to academy chains across England to take major decisions over the future of schools, in effect over the heads of local communities.
Parents at Lapford community primary school, which sits in rolling countryside between Exeter and Barnstaple, have been fighting a decision by the multi-academy trust now running it to have its year 6 pupils educated eight miles away at another of its schools.
Long-term future
They worry that, from September, their children will face a lengthy round trip to school every day, that pupils will have to change school twice in two years and thus that the village school may become unpopular with families, putting, they fear, the school's long-term future at risk.
They have collected a 370-signature petition against the plans – quite a feat in a village of 250 homes – and parents also have the parish council firmly behind them. But there seems little they can do, with the trust not even, it seems, legally required to consult them.
It was only in January last year that Lapford opted to join the Chulmleigh Academy Trust, a multi-academy group formed of three other small primaries and the local secondary school, Chulmleigh community college. At the time, May says, parents were enthusiastic, especially as 56-pupil Lapford had faced an uncertain financial future under Devon county council.
But optimism quickly turned to concern as the academy trust, headed by Mike Johnson, who is principal of Chulmleigh community college, came forward with plans last summer to have older pupils at another of the trust's primaries, East Worlington school, taught at Lapford four mornings a week, with Lapford pupils travelling to East Worlington on Fridays from last September.
Parents at both schools were unhappy because of concerns about pupils travelling. In November, the trust came back with a new offer, involving East Worlington year 5 and 6 pupils spending all week at Lapford. Again, this was shelved after East Worlington parents protested.
In January, the current plan emerged. Lapford and East Worlington year 6 pupils would travel to another school in the trust: Chulmleigh primary, which neighbours the community college. It was approved by the trust in March.
May, whose daughter Tiffany, 10, would have to start making the trip to Chulmleigh primary from September, says: "How would anyone feel about a child having to transfer schools twice in two years?"
Lorraine Kigongo, who has two children at Lapford and runs the village's pre-school, says parents are already talking of pulling children out because they do not want them moving schools in both years 6 and 7. She says: "The trust has just not listened to us at all."
The trust has said that both educational and financial considerations lie behind its proposals. But parents say they have been given little detail. The latest consultation document says that the trust is "facing a deficit within two years" and cannot afford the current set-up of three teachers at both Lapford and East Worlington schools, which between them have 101 pupils.
But Johnson says the main reason for the change is the need to raise "educational standards" at Lapford.
The consultation document says: "The children at Lapford … stand to get better Sats results," but does not say why. Johnson says that Lapford is under pressure – both it and East Worlington have satisfactory/requires improvement verdicts from Ofsted – and that the quickest way to "raise standards" would be to have both classes taught at Chulmleigh primary, which was adjudged "outstanding" when last inspected in 2006.
Two weeks ago, the trust decided to press on with its plans, rejecting Lapford parents' alternative for all Lapford pupils to be taught there by two full-time and one half-time teacher, and with parents volunteering to help out.
Although Johnson says the trust has spent many hours responding to parents' concerns and answering questions, it seems that it has no legal responsibility to do so. When parents complained to the Department for Education, they were told: "There is no statutory requirement for the academy trust to carry out consultation on the restructuring".
In this multi-academy trust, there is no individual governing body for each school, and no formal representation for Lapford among the trust's decision-making directors.
The village of Corby Glen, Lincolnshire, faced losing its 50-year-old secondary school earlier this year after an academy trust that took over the running of the school in 2011 told parents it wanted to close it, moving pupils to another of the trust's secondaries, 12 miles away in Grantham, from 2014.
There was outrage from the community. Lincolnshire county council said the West Grantham Academies Trust's plans for the 230-pupil Charles Read high school would be "detrimental" to education in the area, but it has no powers to intervene.
However, campaigners persuaded their local MP, Nick Boles, to lobby the academies minister, Lord Nash, and are hopeful a deal can be done to have the school kept open by transferring it to another academy trust: the David Ross Foundation.
Academy critics say the underlying issue is that trusts are allowed to take major decisions without the checks and balances that would be present in a local authority school set-up – either around statutory public consultation, or through voter anger on closures feeding back to elected councillors. The only politician who can veto plans is not local, but national: the education secretary, Michael Gove.
Private institutions
Alan Parker, a former schools adjudicator – an official who settles disputes between parents, schools and local authorities over school admissions and reorganisations – says that, in academies, unlike in maintained (non-academy) schools, parents have no right of complaint to the adjudicator over school re-organisation. "In the maintained sector, if there is a reorganisation plan, you have to publish in advance what you plan to do, it's quite clear who must be consulted and how those planning any change have to respond," he says. "That's not the case with academies, which are private institutions, getting public money on the basis of a contract with the secretary of state."
Mervyn Benford, information officer of the National Association for Small Schools, says the advent of multi-academy trusts stands to make small schools more vulnerable. He says: "We believe the government should be concerned about giving academy trusts power to allow them to ride roughshod over local parents."
David Wolfe, a barrister at London's Matrix Chambers who has been involved in legal cases against academies, says: "[Multi-academy trusts] reverse a regime whereby schools were run by their local communities through elected organisations and makes them potentially the playthings of the people who set up the trusts, subject to approval by the secretary of state."
The only hope Lapford parents now have is a possible legal challenge, or persuading Gove to reject the trust's plans. May says that a group of parents are also considering home-schooling their children in the village rather than sending them to Chulmleigh.
Johnson says: "There is no contempt for the people of Lapford. I completely understand the opposition, but we believe this is the way to ensure education standards are as high as possible.
"I do believe that a local authority, with a local councillor speaking for a local primary school, could find it significantly more difficult to make the kind of change that schools sometimes need to make to improve standards."
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The Great Gatsby's world is every bit as unequal as Britain under the coalition | Aditya Chakrabortty
The wealthy in America and Britain no longer resemble the prewar elite, but appearances cannot mask how cut off they are from the rest of us
"Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."
At its core, The Great Gatsby is the story of an American caste system. Jimmy Gatz, a Dakota farm kid turned army captain, tags along with fellow officers to a party, where he glimpses a woman from a different world. In his uniform, the penniless Gatz is not fenced off from Daisy Fay by the usual "indiscernible barbed wire". But in order to marry her, he must erase his history and turn into someone else: Jay Gatsby, former Oxford man, possessor of a vast fortune obscure in its origins but all too visible in its expenditure on parties and hydroplanes and shirts "piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high".
The rest you know – if not from F Scott Fitzgerald then perhaps from Baz Luhrmann's new film version. Although he normally can't see a subtlety without sending in a wrecking ball, Luhrmann has left intact the sense of tremendous human waste. At the top are the "careless people", such as Daisy and husband Tom Buchanan – and then there's everyone else, who cannot gain even a toehold in 1920s America except through some form of shadiness. The chasm between rich and poor puts the American Dream off-limits to most Americans. In Fitzgerald's telling, those such as Gatsby who gave it a shot were doomed to failure. As indeed, was the entire economy. The Jazz Age was followed by the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the Great Depression.
And yet, 90 years on from The Great Gatsby we are in a world that Fitzgerald would have recognised. Last year, the head of Barack Obama's in-house economic thinktank, Princeton professor Alan Krueger, unveiled a graph of what he dubbed "The Gatsby Curve". On the horizontal axis was measured economic inequality; plotted out vertically was to what extent children's chances of success were determined by their parents' wealth. At the bottom of the graph were countries such as Denmark and Sweden: relatively equal societies where children stand a reasonable chance of getting as far as their talent and hard work allowed. But at the top were the UK and the US: societies marked by a massive wealth gap, where poorer children are born with the dice already heavily loaded against them.
In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels. Last year, prize-winning economic geographer Danny Dorling gave a speech in which he plotted how Britain's annual income had been divvied up down the ages. In 1923 the richest 1% of Britons took almost a quarter – 23.3% – of all income received. After the second world war came a long period of greater fairness so that by 1979 that proportion had dropped to only 6%. Then came Thatcher and Blair and soaraway inequality. By 2006, the year before the crash, we weren't quite at a Gatsby-esque divide, but we were heading that way: the top 1% of Britons were taking 15% of all income received in the country. This cash is then turned into houses, shares and other assets so that now the top 1% hold over 50% of all Britain's marketable wealth. And so inequality is passed down the generations. Today's headlines offer endless examples. The average London house now costs over half a million, or more than 19 times what the average British worker makes in a year. A Labour MP points out that of the 159 top civil servants, only five went to comprehensives.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg both know there is a problem with a society that only gives rich kids a chance. Both have made speeches denouncing the lack of social mobility in Britain; the government even has a social mobility strategy. Yet Clegg refuses to accept that there's a link between inequality and immobility. Despite academics advising him otherwise. Despite Alan Milburn's report on Britain's top jobs for the Cabinet Office last year that found: "A majority of employees offering the best-paid graduate jobs target … only 19 universities. The students who attend those 19 universities disproportionately spent their childhoods in the south of England."
The wealthy in America and Britain no longer resemble the prewar elite. They work, for one thing, and you may find the odd ethnic minority or woman in their ranks. But appearances cannot mask how cut off they are from the rest of us. It is still the case that 70% of high court judges were privately educated, even though only 7% of British children attend fee-paying schools. Last week, the Sunday Times reported that Bristol University tutors are considering treating applicants from state schools as "disadvantaged". We used to talk of oppressed minorities; now, it seems, we are in the age of oppressed vast majority.
For those state-school children whose parents can afford it, there is private tuition. Again, this is a world the young Gatsby would have recognised, with his hour each evening devoted to practising "elocution, poise and how to attain it". But for parents who don't need to scrimp and save, there are plenty more places to spend your money to gain advantage for your offspring. If you can, visit the Westminster school website. The insitution attended by our deputy prime minister is holding an auction of internships, often donated by alumni or present parents. For £500 you can buy your teenager two weeks with designer Amanda Wakeley; £600 a spell with a private-equity firm on Jermyn Street; while £300 buys work experience at Coutts.
Fitzgerald would have recognised such a world. Because this is what a 21st-century caste system looks like.
- Social mobility
- Economic policy
- US economic growth and recession
- Economic growth (GDP)
- Property
- Social exclusion
- Liberal-Conservative coalition
- Private schools
- F Scott Fitzgerald
- United States
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Michael Gove suggests Wales and Northern Ireland split off school exams
Education minister says nations' GCSEs and A-levels will diverge from English system as 'consequence of devolution'
The education system is set to splinter into national components, with Michael Gove writing to his Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts to kickstart the separation of GCSEs and A-levels as "a natural and legitimate consequence of devolution".
The education secretary's decision raises the spectre of England, Wales and Northern Ireland all having different secondary school examinations and qualifications, with employers and universities having to distinguish between English, Welsh and Northern Irish GCSEs and A-levels, leading, in time, to the evolution of entirely different education structures, as is already the case in Scotland.
In his joint letter to Leighton Andrews, education minister in the Welsh government, and John O'Dowd, education minister in the Northern Ireland assembly, Gove said "the time is right for us to acknowledge" that the three nations would need to go their separate ways on educational qualifications.
The letter follows a meeting between the three men last week to discuss the subject.
"I recognise that you still have decisions to take on your own reforms to GCSEs and A-levels. It is clear from our discussions, however, that our reforms are leading to very different qualifications in Wales and Northern Ireland from those I believe are right for young people in England," Gove wrote.
He said he had received advice from Ofqual, the education standards regulator in England, that "it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain comparable standards when the structure, content and even grading of these qualifications are diverging to such an extent".
"I therefore believe that the time is right for us to acknowledge that the three-country regulation of GCSEs and A-levels is no longer an objective towards which we should be working," Gove wrote.
Currently, GCSEs and A-levels are set to the same standard for all three regions. But last summer's GCSE marking fiasco saw a fissure develop between the responses in London and Cardiff, with the Welsh government taking what their English counterparts regarded as a softer stance.
A Whitehall source said: "The Welsh are determined to keep dumbing down their exams. Leighton Andrews interfered with exam boards last year. He opposes our attempts to toughen things up and made clear he will continue to interfere to make things easier. It's better that we all go our own way and defend our positions to our electorates.
"It's been agreed that we will explore what the Northern Irish described as 'a surgical separation'."
The situation is complicated because Wales has no equivalent of Ofqual, with the education minister also acting as standards regulator.
In his letter, Gove warns that Wales and Northern Ireland may have to give up the GCSE and GCE titles. "With this issue resolved, I see no reason why cross-border differences in qualifications should not work between England, Wales and Northern Ireland as they do between our three jurisdictions and Scotland."
A Welsh government spokesman said: "Wales is keeping GCSEs and A-levels, as is Northern Ireland. We wish Mr Gove well with his plans to rename these qualifications in England."
Richard Adamsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Education in brief: Is the DfE trying to rig the teacher-education market?
The education department seems desperate to teach more teachers; Newham local authority refuses to release a report's findings; parents give up on battle against academy chain
Trainee teachers: a spot of poaching?
Relations between the government and university-based teacher educators have reached a new low amid claims that a Department for Education agency has been attempting to lure would-be students away from the traditional higher education sector towards a favoured ministerial project.
An email sent by the National College for Teaching and Leadership – which oversees both traditional, university-based provision and the new School Direct school-based route – sought to persuade prospective postgraduate certificate in education university trainees to consider its rival. It reads: "You may have already applied for a PGCE by now, but have you thought about applying for School Direct?"
It continues, under "Why you should apply for School Direct": "School Direct is different. That's because you're part of a school team from day one, where you can train as a teacher with the expectation of a job once you qualify.
"It's free to apply. Simple too."
The Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers (Ucet) has furiously accused the government of trying to "manipulate" the teacher-education market, arguing that its members have tried to play fair by not discouraging would-be students away from School Direct, which is the favoured route of the education secretary, Michael Gove.
Just as intriguing, though, is why officials felt the need to make the appeal. Although the DfE published figures this month suggesting applications for School Direct have been very healthy, questions have been raised about the detail behind the numbers, amid persistent rumours that the total actually accepted on to School Direct is still low. Is the DfE getting desperate?
Governors throw in towelThe highest-profile battle fought by parents this year against moves by the government to enforce an academy "sponsor" on a non-academy school seems to have been lost. Governors at Roke primary in Kenley, Surrey, voted by a 2-1 majority to stop contesting its transfer to the Harris academy chain, bringing to an end four months of furious campaigning by parents.
This was triggered after the government responded to a "requires improvement" Ofsted verdict on the previously "outstanding" Roke by insisting that the school was to be sponsored by Harris, rather than another local academy seemingly favoured by governors and parents.
The majority of governors are understood to have come to the view that the arrival of Harris in September had become the only way to stabilise the school, which lost its headteacher last month. But parent campaigners are bitterly disappointed, complaining they were not consulted, and that they had raised money for a legal challenge. This would now not work, said a source, without governor support.
Ironically, governors have just been sent the results of the consultation carried out by Harris on the plans. Parents are said to have voted by clear majorities both against Harris's sponsorship and against any move to academy status. So much for local democracy.
School secretsA London local authority is facing pressure to release an investigation report on management practice at a school once described as "outstanding" by Ofsted. Newham council has rejected a freedom of information request for the report, which was written about activities at Langdon school in the period from 2004 to 2009, after a probe by education consultant Tim Blanchard. Allegations investigated included claims that free school meals and pupil attendance data were falsified.
Newham has relied on a provision within freedom of information legislation that can allow the non-release of reports on the basis that individuals could be identified. Rick Helm, a former teacher at the school who made the request, is challenging the decision through the information commissioner. Newham said: "Newham council's decision [not to release the report] is currently being reviewed by the information commissioner. It would be inappropriate to comment further."
Langdon was in the spotlight in 2005 when pupils travelled to Singapore to support London's successful Olympics bid. A letter sent to Langdon staff last year, by a second investigator into the affair, Susan Paul, said that Blanchard's report had found evidence of a "systematic process involving professional malpractice designed to show the school in the best light educationally and also to benefit financially".
It also said Blanchard had concluded that attendance, exclusions and free school meals data had been falsified and that "inappropriate processes" had been followed with regard to keeping pupils officially "on-roll" and "off-roll". Paul wrote to staff saying she wanted to "assess and if necessary challenge" Blanchard's findings. Education Guardian understands Paul's investigation never concluded.
Asked to comment, Newham said: "Following an independent investigation into serious allegations regarding management and administrative matters at the school between 2004 and 2009, six members of staff were suspended. Disciplinary procedures were undertaken … resulting in a number of these members of staff leaving. There has been no further evidence of management irregularities." It added that improvements had since been made to teaching and management.
Helm said: "I am disappointed that Newham has not released the report, as there needs to be a resolution of these issues." Last month, the school lost its "outstanding" rating and was placed in special measures.
Warwick Mansellguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Propaganda war: who will win Scottish teenage hearts and minds?
Schools are gearing up to be a key battleground in next year's referendum on Scottish independence
Rosie Duthie and Euan MacIntosh, both 15, have made up their minds on how they plan to vote in next year's referendum on Scottish independence. For Euan the answer is a clear "yes" because he believes it will be his best guarantee of a free university education. Rosie is a "no". She says: "We should be arguing that what we think is better for the future of young people in Scotland is better for England too and for the European Union."
Next year these young people from Douglas academy in the salubrious Glaswegian suburb of Milngavie will be among the first 16-year-olds in the UK mainland ever to vote. It appears that, like Rosie and Euan, many are taking their role in the process very seriously. It is a change that will bring politics into classrooms and canteens. People on both sides of the border will be watching closely the success or failure of extending the franchise to schoolchildren.
Some, like the Scotland Office minister David Mundell, claim the turnout among teenagers will be small because only middle-class children will bother to get themselves on the young people's voting register, which will remain confidential to avoid making children's addresses public.
But the move has widespread support in the Scottish parliament, with the first draft of the bill to give 16-year-olds a vote in the referendum passing last week on a vote of 97 to 12. The Liberal Democrats are committed to widening the franchise to all elections, and Labour is considering whether to include it in its manifesto for the 2015 election.
The leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, has said it may be "dispiriting and depressing" for young people who vote in the referendum to find they are then denied a vote in the general election a few months later.
The vote is something the 20-year-old vice-chair of the Scottish youth parliament, Kyle Thornton, and many others across the UK have lobbied hard for. "We have been campaigning for a decade and we will be working really hard to get people to register; we will be going in to schools and motivating the young people to make sure they are on the register … This is an opportunity to create a politically aware generation.
Thornton has now left Bellahouston academy in Glasgow, but he says: "In my last two years at school there was a general election, a European election, a council election and a Scottish election. There was an irony that we couldn't vote – I think we were as well qualified as any adult."
For teachers, the next academic year will be challenging as they try to ensure a fair hearing for both sides and to contain the massive lobbying effort that is likely to reach schools. Both sides of the debate are recruiting hundreds of teen ambassadors to take their arguments into schools, preparing teachers' packs, and offering speakers and visits. There is likely to be some mediation by the Electoral Commission in this new electoral battleground.
Emma Hendry, principal of modern studies at Elgin academy, is already debating the issues with year 9s and upwards. She says: "They are excited or at least interested in the idea that they will have a vote and that it will be about a decision that is so important to their future … I think they will be at least as well-informed as most adults because they are still in the education system and will have opportunities to hear the arguments."
Hendry herself is undecided. "The young people ask me how I will vote. I can honestly tell them I haven't made up my mind yet."
At Douglas academy, pupils are in training for STV (central Scotland's ITV franchise) and the national debating competition Debating Matters on independence. The school won a regional final of the Debating Matters championship this year and deputy head Stephen Sinclair is planning a series of debates on the issues around independence.
During the heats, teams will debate questions such as whether an independent Scotland should keep the pound. The last, televised, round will be on the referendum question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
Teenagers who have already volunteered to represent either side are accessing training and creating political relationships and CVs that could stand them in good stead for their future careers. Michael Low, 17, a sixth-year pupil at Bishopbriggs academy in Glasgow who has a conditional offer to study politics at Oxford next year, has already attended a session with someone from the Obama campaign.
"There is a lot of discussion in school, informally," he says. "People know I am a Better Together [the pro-UK campaign] youth rep and they can ask me about particular issues, or they can ask me for badges and other campaign material."
Meanwhile, the yes campaign aims to recruit 10,000 youth ambassadors. Ellie Koepplinger, 16, from Glasgow's Hillhead high, is on the yes campaign board. She says: "I feel my teachers are quite opinionated, and are willing to discuss independence when prompted, but most won't go out of their way to have that discussion with pupils. However, I strongly feel that many pupils are interested in the debate, and want to know more."
She wants to help counter some of the information teenagers share on social media, which can at times be "wildly unrealistic".
Like Low, Koepplinger believes in votes at 16 for all elections. She says young people like "the thought that we could actually make a difference to something. It will allow us to hold our heads up higher to say that we have proved we are able to take part in something like this."
Jackie Kempguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Confused about the national curriculum? Here, have a pre-loaded tablet
Michael Gove has a sense that 'significant innovation' is coming soon to a classroom near you. Could it have anything to do with Rupert Murdoch's education company?
Next year schools don't need to follow the national curriculum. The year after, only some of them will. And the year after that, robots will be teaching our children. Don't believe me? Read on.
To surprisingly little fanfare, the government has "disapplied" the national curriculum from September 2013, except for English, maths and science in some primary years. Schools should still teach all subjects named in the current curriculum, but it will be up to each teacher to decide what content to include. The logic is that removing the old curriculum for a year gives teachers a chance to prepare for the new curriculum, starting in 2014. Problem is, the next draft of the new content won't be out for consultation until July – a particularly bad time to consult with teachers – and it will mean the final curriculum will not get into the hands of schools until at least September. Teachers are therefore facing the distinct possibility of needing to create a hybrid curriculum ready for autumn but not knowing what that will involve until they are back in their classrooms.
So … won't teachers just stick with what they already have? They can't. The government's endless fiddling with assessments means even teachers wishing to recycle old materials must spend hours reworking them to meet new requirements. "Disapplication" sounds as if everyone is going to have a year off: to plan, and think, and innovate. That's an illusion. Instead, teachers will probably still spend next year revising their previous lessons, while painfully aware that the following autumn they will have to throw them out and write new ones.
Then, in September 2014, teachers must rein in all their innovative tendencies and follow the government's new "highly prescriptive" programmes of study. Unless the teacher works in an academy. Academies don't have to teach the national curriculum, ever – somewhat undermining the title.
So far Michael Gove, the education secretary, has given no clear reason why not all schools should follow the new curriculum. He recently praised individual schools for developing their own curricula, including Ark schools' maths programme and Pimlico academy's content-rich curriculum. But this praise for school-based development contrasts sharply with speeches made earlier in his tenure. Back in 2011, Gove repeatedly emphasised the impact of rigorous, prescribed curricula in the world's best-performing countries and was taken enough with the idea of compulsory core knowledge that he even asked experts to investigate the practicalities of having nationally required textbooks. Why has he suddenly gone cold on the idea? Oh yes, the robots …
Last week in the House of Commons Gove was asked whether children would be better served by having the national curriculum revised at fixed periods rather than at the personal whim of ministers. Gove, in an opaque statement, claimed he did not wish to prescribe in a way that might hinder changes arising from new technologies. "I have this sense of significant innovation coming," he said with a mystical flourish. "I don't want to unnecessarily constrain it."
One can't help but wonder if this "sense" has anything to do with Amplify, an educational group already selling tablet computers to schools in the US pre-loaded with curriculum materials. Amplify, as it happens, is part of Rupert Murdoch's education company. Also, Marketing Magazine reported in March, following a Freedom of Information request, that Gove had been visited in 2012 by officials from the TabletsForSchools programme – whose staff include Andrew Harrison, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, and Sebastian James, chief executive of Dixons. Gove gave a seal of approval to the scheme and ordered his department to help the company with its plans of trialling and then rolling out tablets across the country. Results are due out in September of the first trials evaluating the impact of tablet teaching on student achievement.
So the robots aren't coming just yet. But it's not too much of a leap to imagine that schools full of over-worked teachers scrabbling to keep up with change might think an off-the-shelf curriculum on sale from another school, or a tablet replete with pre-planned lessons, is an answer to their nightmares. I don't know about you, but I have this mystical sense of significant profit to be made. No wonder some people don't want to constrain it.
• Laura McInerney taught in London for six years and is currently a Fulbright scholar
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Do students get enough contact time with tutors?
A report for consumer watchdog Which? and the Higher Education Policy Institute last week found that nearly one in three first-year students at UK universities felt their courses were not good value. We ask: would you like more contact with your tutors?
Bob Hughes graduated recently with a BA in English from York University
I had four to eight hours of seminars and lectures a week, with anything from 30 students to around 200 in lectures and around 10 to 15 of us in seminars.
It gave me a lot of time to find my own arguments and thoughts and critically engage with it. Had we had more contact hours in certain areas, it would have detracted from our independent studies.
But I know for a number of students paying £9,000 a year the expectation is higher. Some have tried working out roughly how much per hour a seminar or lecture costs. I think that number is arbitrary and doesn't reflect all the university experience. But they do want more bang for their buck.
Ana Apostu has just completed a foundation year in sciences at London Metropolitan University, where she is about to start a BSc in biological sciences
On the foundation year, I got 12 hours a week of lectures and tutorials and our teachers also set up study groups for people who didn't manage to get their heads around the subjects. There were around 12 to 15 people in each tutorial group and more in the lectures. Next year, I will do around 15 to 18 hours. For the foundation year it was enough and hopefully next year, when fees are £8,000, it will be the same.
Science is a difficult subject and you need a lot of hours of practice and learning. In some cases I would like more practicals. Theory is something you can research on your own, but you need a tutor to be next to you and to show you practical skills.
Shakeel Ibrahim is a second-year optometry student at Aston University
I have six hours of lectures a week, a half-hour seminar, 10 hours of practicals and optional practice sessions on Tuesday mornings. I think it's perfect. All lectures are put up online and the seminar is recorded as well, so if you don't go you can catch up.
I was the last year to pay £3,500, but even if I was paying £9,000 I'd still think it's worth it because when you qualify and start earning you can pay it back. I measure it not in hours, but in how well I feel I have progressed and how well I'm doing in assessments.
Georgia Barclay, first-year politics and parliamentary studies student at Leeds University
I have seven hours of lectures, seminars and a workshop every week, plus four hours for electives – I'm doing languages. The seminars have about 20 people, the workshop was optional so numbers decreased, lectures are huge. It seems reasonable for the amount we are learning and what we need for exams and for coursework. The £9,000 is for the whole university experience – the exposure to employers, different things you can put on a CV.
Jahnavi Emmanuel, second-year history student at Wadham College, Oxford University
I have one to three hours a week of one-to-one tutorials and two hours of lectures with between 10 and 40 people. I often find I would get more out of an hour's reading than going to a lecture – it depends on the lecturer. The quality of contact time I get in terms of tutorials is much better than friends who do history at other universities.
There's a massive disparity between science and arts subjects. Science students have lectures from nine to 12, then labs from one to five and have tutorials on top of that. But at the end we all come out with an Oxford degree – we get the same product.
Harriet Swainguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Cardinal skips Boston College commencement in abortion protest
Presence of Irish prime minister Enda Kenny, who supports bill to allow abortion, prompts Cardinal Sean O'Malley's withdrawal
Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the leader of the Boston archdiocese, skipped Boston College's commencement on Monday because of the involvement of the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, who supports a bill in his country that would allow abortion.
A few dozen protesters, some playing bagpipes, demonstrated at the college during the morning graduation ceremony. They held signs with messages that included "Boston College Keep Your Pro Life Values".
Kenny was addressing undergraduates and accepting an honorary degree from the Jesuit-run college. He has said that the proposed legislation simply clarifies when a doctor can perform an abortion to save a woman's life. But Catholic bishops have said it would greatly expand abortion, particularly by permitting it in certain cases when a woman threatens suicide.
The leader of the Boston archdiocese traditionally gives the benediction at the college's ceremony. O'Malley called abortion a "crime against humanity" and said he had decided not to attend the ceremony because Boston College didn't withdraw its invitation and Kenny didn't decline it. A Boston College spokesman, Jack Dunn, said that the school respected O'Malley and regretted that he had not attended graduation. Dunn said school officials had extended the invitation to Kenny before the bill's introduction and that the college "fully supports the church's commitment to the unborn".
CJ Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League and one of the protesters, said that too many Catholic institutions have compromised their identity. "What rational person can reasonably be expected to take seriously Catholic opposition to abortion when our own Catholic institutions honor someone who's trying to legalize abortion in his country?" he said.
Also at Monday's ceremony, two graduate business students who were injured in the Boston Marathon bombings were to receive their diplomas. Brittany Loring and Liza Cherney are graduating from the Carroll School of Management. Loring needed three operations after her left leg was struck by shrapnel from the first of the two blasts at the marathon finishing line on 15 April. Cherney was standing next to her close friend and classmate and was also badly hurt.
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How to teach ... spelling
Learning how to spell is a useful lifelong skill. Use the Guardian Teacher Network's resources this week to help your students get to grips with it
Whether or not last week's introduction of compulsory spelling tests for all key stage 2 pupils in England will improve literacy standards, there are many reasons to crack spelling. The Guardian Teacher Network has resources to help students spell words such as "necessary" with ease and learn a lifelong skill, which they will need when their computer spellcheck malfunctions.
For key stage 2 and beyond, start with 100 most common words spelling journal. One of the most popular resources on the Guardian Teacher Network, the resource is helpfully separated into 10 weeks with 10 words per week. Each week includes word list, practice space, wordsearch and anagrams.
Thanks to English teacher and examiner Roger Smith, the teacher behind Spelling it Right, who is a big fan of the look-think-cover-write-check method of memorising spellings. This resource focuses on how to remember the spelling of new words and there's a worksheet showing a practical example of using the strategy to memorise a complicated word: disestablishmentarianism. Parents can encourage their children to become better spellers with the help of this spelling it right handout.
Retired English teacher Chris Hardwidge has shared contractions spelling for years 3 and 4 to practise spelling in contractions, including the somewhat tricky use of apostrophes. Also find these year 4 tests covering most of the key spelling objectives for year 4, with the words embedded in simple sentences.
Make learning spelling fun with this set of 24 cards, with a variety of strategies in the form of games and activities. The Bossy ecard game is also entertaining for younger children.
Print out and laminate this useful spelling card shared by English teacher Joseph Donovan, listing the most commonly misspelt words – great for those learning English as well as spelling.
The Guardian Teacher Network also has a series of interactive lessons on spelling for all the key stages, written by English teachers to tackle the most common spelling issues.
Spelling long vowel phonemes is a revision lesson for primary focusing on the past tense "ed" verb ending. Spelling strategies introduces a number of strategies to key stage 2 pupils, both for learning spellings and for tackling the spelling of difficult words. Not all strategies are effective every time, but this lesson will help to reinforce these familiar approaches through interactive practice.
This activity is great for teaching year 4 and 5 pupils to spell medium-frequency words. And here is a revision of seven spelling rules aimed at year 5, mostly involving suffixes and consonants.
Helping students group words into commonly occurring letter strings is another great strategy for the teaching of spelling. This lesson focuses on the word endings -ight, - ious, -ial and -ough.
For a bit of context, looking at the common roots of words and their origins gives children an insight into the way that language has been built up over the centuries and also enables them to begin developing spelling strategies, and to infer the meaning of words new to them.
For students who haven't mastered the basics at primary school, this one-stop-shop interactive on spelling for key stage 3 is very helpful. By the end of this lesson, students should be able to recognise different prefixes and suffixes attached to root words, and use them correctly to form new words, plus recognise the importance of word families. The basic rules are spelt out (and of course the exceptions to each rule).
The only surefire way to improve your spelling is to recognise, understand, correct and record errors –this spelling diary looks at ways to do this with some nice online activities. Creative spelling will help students to devise their own ways of improving their spelling, applying spelling rules and recognising exceptions using dictionaries. Spelling strategies will help students address personal difficulties with words and experiment with different ways of learning and remembering difficult spellings, for example using mnemonics and applying knowledge of word origins.
This interactive on spelling complex words and exceptions will help students to understand how to spell complex polysyllabic words and unfamiliar words that do not conform to regular patterns.
It's never too late to learn to spell, and there's no reason why a weak speller at primary school shouldn't become a fully literate key stage 4 student. Universities complain about bad spelling from even their brightest students. Correct spelling will make a student's work easier to read and understand. This spelling interactive for key stage 4 goes over general spelling rules and gives practice in choosing the correct versions of commonly misspelt words.
It's fascinating for children to discover that the way we spell words is not exactly set in stone and is in fact the result of a series of compromises. Not that long ago, people spelled the same words in any number of ways and students can compare different spellings used in other English-speaking countries. The history of spelling explains more.
There have long been calls to simplify spelling, including an attempt by George Bernard Shaw, and you may be interested to read these teachers' notes on SaypYU (pronounced Sipe-You), the Spell As You Pronounce Universal collaborative project that aims to build a list of words from all languages spelled using a 24-letter alphabet. The letters C, Q and X have been removed and replaced by their phonetic equivalents: K and/or S. The theory goes that the simple spelling of words would make it easier to learn how to read and write, and learn foreign languages. The website http://saypu.com is a lot of fun to explore.
And finally, for serious spelling and grammar fans, do take our grammar, punctuation and spelling quiz, which has been entertaining teachers and other interested adults since we launched it in February this year.
Join the Guardian Teacher Network community for free access to teaching resources and an opportunity to share your own as well as read and comment on blogs. There are also thousands of teaching, leadership and support jobs on the site.
Emily Drabbleguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
