School entrance exams should be scrapped because the traditional selection system is being undermined by a culture of private tutoring, according to one of the country's leading headmasters.    

Revelations about the National Security Agency's online surveillance raise important questions about privacy in a digital age. Explore the issues in class with these resources

The extent of the US National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance using a computer programme called Prism to access the contents of emails and live chat held by the world's major internet companies including Google, Facebook and Skype is one of the most significant leaks in US political history. The story was first disclosed last week by investigative journalists at the Guardian – and now the whistleblower, IT specialist Edward Snowden has fled to Hong Kong in fear of reprisal from the US authorities.

Here we pull together the best news stories, multimedia, teaching resources and websites to help you make sense of the story in class and look at the wider issues of privacy and surveillance and in the English, politics and citizenship classroom as well as the debate club with your students.

From the Guardian

National Security Agency (NSA) Prism program taps into user data of Apple, Google and others
This story, published on Friday 7 June when Edward Snowden was still an anonymous source, reveals how the top secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook and how the companies deny any knowledge of the program which has been in operation since 2007. The article drew nearly 3,000 comments from readers.

Edward Snowden hailed as hero, accused of treason as it happened – live blog
On Sunday 9 June the Guardian revealed the source behind its series of stories on the NSA was Edward Snowden, 29. This fascinating live blog starts at 6.22am on Monday morning and lasts all day. Is Snowden a hero or a traitor? Read the opposing views and expert's comments in this fascinating blog.

How the spy story of the age leaked out
The full story behind the scoop and why the whistleblower approached the Guardian.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden explains why he spoke out – video
IT specialist Edward Snowden on why he decided to speak out: "I don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of thing".

Why Prism should be stopped immediately – opinion
Have our privacy rights been eroded in favour of government control? Kim Dotcom argues yes in this comment is free article.

Data snooping - law abiding citizens have 'nothing to fear' says foreign secretary William Hague – video
The foreign secretary, William Hague, says reports that Government Communications (GCHQ) are gathering intelligence from phones and online sites should not concern people who have nothing to hide.

Oops, I shouldn't have sent that – interactive
Find out under which circumstances your data could be uncovered, and which steps the government would have to take to retrieve it.

A Guardian guide to your metadata – interactive
What is all this metadata that's generated as you use technology? Here's a revealing guide to the data collected through the activities you do every day on your computer and mobile devices.

#NSAfiles Q&A: how to protect yourself online
Guardian's data editor James Ball answer's questions about the NSA data collection program - fascinating and useful stuff.

On the Guardian Teacher Network

Debate rages on internet 'snooping' revelation
This article from schools news service The Day provides a very clear explanation of the IT worker who exposed mass US surveillance of emails and phone calls otherwise known as Prism. The article includes a Q&A plus activities for schools.

Online privacy topic guide
A great intro to the subject of online privacy from Debating Matters – should we really expect our activities on the internet to remain private? Everything pupils need to know for a heated debate plus extensive further reading.

The Projectionist – lesson plans on privacy and surveillance
This is a really fantastic set of cross curricular lesson ideas from the Theatre of Debate, based on Laura FitzGerald's play which explores the themes of privacy and surveillance including social networking sites and CCTV. Lots of food for thought here and you can also find an accompanying podcast.

Codes with Anne Lister
Those worried about privacy may like to follow in the footsteps of lesbian writer Anne Lister who wrote her diaries in code, as this PowerPoint from equality campaigning group Schools Out explains. Find all parts of the code lesson here including how to make a code wheel and invisible ink.

The best of the web

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
The website of the government agency tasked with keeping UK society safe and successful in the internet age – by providing info and intelligence and specialising in cyber security. GCHQ is one of three UK intelligence agencies – the other two being the MI5 and MI6.

National Security Agency (NSA)
What do the NSA have to say about the disclosure of classified information from Edward Snowden? Unsurprisingly it isn't too happy but doesn't make such a big meal of revelations on its official website.

Liberty – on the Snooper's Charter
Civil liberty and human rights champions Liberty set out their campaign to stop government's communications data bill (which Liberty dub the 'Snooper's Charter'), the proposed plans to store our online data. Explore the issues here – great fuel for debate clubs.

Big Brother Watch
The group set up to defend civil liberties and protect privacy has lots to say on the subject of Prism, the NSA and internet privacy – and the questions that it poses for the UK.

The Register's take on Prism
The British technology news and opinion website gives its take on Prism and the advice is to keep calm and carry on - Prism is not such a big deal... however Skype is no longer safe and we should keep an eye on the much more complex surveillance system the Home Office wants to install.

What is prism?
Useful Q&A from the Independent explaining what prism is, what it does, is it legal and what data it can obtain.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.

• Schools
• Teaching
• Prism
• Surveillance
• Data and computer security
• Freedom of information
• Edward Snowden

Emily Drabble
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Headteacher Carol Powell talks about the headteacher mentors that helped her take on a challenging role at the troubled Gorton Mount primary

How did you become a head?

I started my career working in museums for seven years, first in research and then on the education side at Quarry Bank Mill. I got so interested in education that I decided to do a PGCE but when I finished it I was invited back to Quarry Mill to work on strategy. After a while I realised I really did want to teach in schools so when I was 27 I did my NQT (newly-qualified teacher) year at Claremont Junior in Moss Side, Manchester. That's where I learnt pretty much everything. I worked for a most fantastic head Richard Fye, who taught me so much about how to manage a team. I owe him a great debt.

What's the important tip you learnt in those early days?

To trust people to do a good job. You need to start from the philosophy that your staff are motivated and good at their jobs. It's only when there are problems that you move in. Richard Fye at Claremont was subtle, and I liked that. As a team we all cared what he thought and that encouraged us to work doubly hard for results – and I'm talking about results in the wider sense, not just statistics. The other thing about Richard's approach is that he had a number of leaders and middle leaders who set his tone, so he was able to delegate his philosophy. It made Claremont a very comfortable place to work.

When Richard left and went off to do something else, the headship was taken over by Pauline Dempsey. She had a very different style but was also inspirational to me. Years later, now I am a head myself, I realise that many of my systems are her systems. So, I feel really lucky to have had great training and wonderful colleagues who were motivated, skilled, intelligent and reflective – truly great examples of leaders and managers. I had the opportunity to work with Richard again when he came back into headship and led Medlock primary school. We had a great Ofsted and were put in the 20 most effective schools in challenging circumstances. I became deputy head at Medlock and then I realised I was ready to be a headteacher.

What brought you to your current school, Gorton Mount?

When I applied for the job, my headteacher at the time advised me not to go for it, as it was a terrible school. But I wanted to look around. As soon as I got there I knew something wasn't right. It wasn't just the data and the results, it was the tensest place I've ever been in. I had a tightly guarded tour and wasn't allowed into certain areas of the school. But I wanted a challenge. I knew Gorton Mount had a reputation for being a difficult school but I wanted to push myself. The previous head had been suspended so I was asked to start almost immediately in November 2002.

Tell us a more about what the school was like when you took it over

The behaviour was through the roof. Children were just running around, in fact they were even running around on the roof. Only 18% of children could read at the expected level. Children swore at me. No child in Moss Side ever swore at me. I cried three times in that first year. Once when children were taken into care in a particularly nasty case, the second time when I asked a year 6 teacher why a bright boy in his class wasn't in a gifted and talented programme and the teacher told me: "Because he's a Gorton boy. He's going to steal cars and smoke weed so there's no point." I cried again when I asked a reception teacher why she was teaching her class the seven times table sitting in rows and she told me it was because none of them could count to 20 and they didn't have any social skills so couldn't sit in small groups.

How did you turn the school around?

Behaviour was the biggest problem. I could either exclude every child who was running riot, and that would mean excluding a lot of children, or I could help the pupils gain self-regulating skills and the ability to concentrate. The first thing I did was institute an emotional literacy programme and it took just over two years for behaviour to really change. We've got good behaviour now.

Secondly I had to weed out poor teachers. It's a very difficult thing to do and I know many of the teachers hated me. Some just decided to leave, they knew they weren't able to work with me. The teacher turnover at the school had been huge before I arrived and there had been seven heads in the six years before I arrived. When I took on the headship I really had only had one teacher who was decent – and she was a supply teacher. I persuaded her to stay on and she is now head of foundation. I recruited an advanced skills teacher (AST) who was absolutely superb and I could never had done it without her.

Was it difficult to recruit for a school with such a bad reputation?

When I interviewed new teachers I'd tell them exactly what the school was like first to find out if they were still interested in such a big challenge. If they weren't up for it there wasn't any point going any further. My senior team are now made up of the teachers who accepted the challenge in those early days and they are amazing.

How were the parents when you first took on the headship?

I have never had so many threats against me as I did in that first year. Parents would ask: "Are you going to stay?" I'd tell them I was going to stay for as long as it takes and they just didn't believe me. In the first few months I had a queue of parents to see me every morning and every afternoon. They would come and yell at me about things that had nothing to do with education but about who said or did what to who and what was I going to do about it?

When a parent came into talk to me about her worries about her child's reading I almost cried with relief. It's like water on a stone, it took years but now parents are all polite to me. It's been a struggle to get parents in for parents' evenings, but our last had 78% attendance and that's the best we've ever had. We now have parent helpers coming in to read and help out with trips, something that just didn't happen before.

So, how did you do it?

I put myself out there. I made myself available. I stood outside before and after school and introduced myself to the parents, I asked them about their child. Reputations take a long time to build. People still say it's a hard school and I say, "yes, but it's a good school now, have you read our latest Ofsted?"

Montessori teaching methods have also been central to our success. More than half my staff are Montessori trained and that's been particularly important because we have a high proportion of Roma children in our school who come from non-literate traditions and around 57% of our pupils have English as their second language.

Montessori methods, based around the concept that a child learns most when they are active, help us to accelerate progress really effectively. So when we got 71% of our pupils to level 4 last year I was incredibly proud. It really is terrific progress when so many children come in on such a low baseline. Our last Ofsted was good despite the school being below floor level results. Last year two of our pupils got bursaries to go to Manchester Grammar school, which we are only two miles away from and no-one from our school has ever gone to before. It's an amazing achievement.

How important is it to work with other schools?

We are part of a group of six schools working together in the Bright futures Trust. I think it's the only trust in the country that is run by a headteacher. So this means I have this incredible group of peers and experts to work with spread across several schools including Altrincham Grammar. I was resistant to becoming an academy at first, but these days no school will survive on its own and I'm so happy to be part of this caring, value-driven organisation where the child is at the heart. It's all I've ever by driven by.

Carol Powell is headteacher of Gorton Mount Primary Academy, part of the Bright Futures Educational Trust, since 2002.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.

• School leadership and management
• Schools
• Teaching

Emily Drabble
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More than 150 council leaders write to the Observer, warning the chancellor that they cannot absorb more cuts

More than 150 council leaders – including 36 Conservatives – have warned George Osborne that vital services such as libraries, children's centres and sports clubs will have to close if he imposes further cuts on local government in next week's spending review.

In a letter to the Observer, 151 council chiefs say that a further round of austerity, in addition to the 33% cuts already imposed since 2010, cannot be absorbed without devastating social and economic implications.

Councils fear that Osborne will impose a further 10% budget cut in his imminent spending purge, meaning that an average council will have to make a further £30m in savings in 2015-16. The Local Government Association, representing more than 370 authorities in England and Wales, says the rising cost of social care has added to already intense pressure on budgets and that local government is having to pay the cost of inefficiency in Whitehall. In their letter the council chiefs say that, while local government has been hit by 33% cuts since the coalition came to office, Whitehall departments have only had to take an average cut of 12%.

The letter states: "This pattern cannot be repeated without it having a serious impact on local services and on people. Councils have so far taken £3.1bn from the annual paybill, reduced management costs by more than 12.5% and saved hundreds of millions of pounds by teaming up to deliver both back office and frontline services.

"Council tax increases have also been kept well below the rate of inflation for the past four years. The resilience of local government cannot be stretched much further. For many councils, new funding cuts in 2015-16 will lead to a significant reduction in, and in some cases even loss of, important local services."

Warning of lasting economic damage, they add: "Local government bore the brunt of cuts in the last spending review. For the sake of the public it cannot afford to do so again. It would be bad for the country, bad for people and bad for our prospects of economic recovery if funding for local services is cut further to reinforce inefficiencies within Whitehall."

The chancellor will announce further cuts of £11.5bn for 2015-16 in the spending review and arguments are continuing in Whitehall over where the cuts should be made.

Earlier this month, the House of Commons public accounts committee said that dozens of local authorities were on the brink of financial collapse and argued that ministers had failed to come up with adequate contingency plans to support vital services

The committee said that if funding continued to decline while demand for services rose, it was likely that councils would have to be bailed out.

Councils are also saying that they will have to make deep cuts to highways' budgets, reduce spending on galleries, libraries and the voluntary sector, turn off street lighting between midnight and dawn and reduce non-statutory schools transport. Ministers argue, however, that councils are sitting on huge reserves and that austerity is forcing necessary efficiencies on them.

• Local government
• George Osborne
• Cuts and closures
• Tax and spending

Toby Helm
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Cellist and Twitter composer Peter Gregson on the meeting ground between music and technology

Edinburgh-born Peter Gregson is a cellist, composer and founder of the Electric Creative Colab, a body that aims to foster collaborations between the arts and technology. Last year, working with composer and "sonic artist" Daniel Jones and the Britten Sinfonia, Gregson produced the Listening Machine, a piece of software that absorbed the tweets of 500 people around the country and turned it into a continuous stream of music. A debut album of acoustic and electric cello music, Terminal, was released in 2010. Later this year Gregson will start work on a new album and a film score.

You can compose music and you can code. Are the skills similar?

There is a similarity. You start with something you want to see exist, to enable. And there are many ways to achieve that, all sorts of nuances to consider, lots of aesthetic choices to make in order to keep the process going. It's not simple problem-solving. There are all sorts of rabbit holes down which you can get lost for days and days...

You've worked to tighten the links between technology and the arts. What are the difficulties you've encountered?

Coding is an amazing, elaborate art form in itself. Funding mechanisms don't reflect that. They don't value the coder as an integral part of the creative output. It's assumed that coding is a pre-production, first-stage hurdle that's got to be dealt with – then the art can happen. I don't see that as the case. We value our artists' time and pretentiousness – let them disappear into the woods to create – but don't do the same for coders.

Why is that?

With drag-and-drop website creation, or adverts saying "Turn any website into a mobile app – ta da!", people assume everything is that simple and easy and quick and then get surprised when it takes three months. When we were making the Listening Machine last year it took us six full weeks of writing algorithms before we could start writing the music. There was no instant jazz-hands moment. You can't shoehorn the arts into the technology world, and you can't shoehorn the technology world into the arts sector. They need to be acknowledged as equal partners.

What were you trying to demonstrate with the Listening Machine?

I wanted to hear what a day sounded like. Dan and I took it from there. Twitter is dynamic, it's evolutionary, conversations evolve, they've got a pulse to them. You can visualise that – but what if you could listen to that dynamism evolve? We thought music had the capacity to do that.

Is technology making music easier to learn?

There's so much nuance and physicality to music – it's a human thing. I'm fortunate to work with some of the top people in these fields [of music-teaching technology] and I'm yet to see anything that does anything. Cello bows with accelerometers and gyrometers attached... The idea being that you make a piece of kit that for a couple of thousand dollars will teach someone how to hold a bow, play a bow, learn how to do good bow changing. I'm sitting there, and nobody else seemed to have seen the elephant in the room – that this cello bow, with all this stuff fitted on it, bore no relation to a real cello bow. As a professional cellist I was able to accommodate it. But the point that tool would be useful would be when you're four or five. And this thing was heavy. There's software that listens to what you play [and judges it] by looking for pitch tracking, but you can trick these things very easily. You can play with horrifically bad technique and make it think that you're doing it really well because it can only look out for a certain number of things. It's nowhere near as sophisticated as a person sitting looking at a pupil playing the violin. It's entirely possible – I've tried it – to make this technology think you're playing a beautiful scale but by using a piece of fruit to play your cello instead of a finger. I used an orange.

Isn't it democratising?

I see the geographic benefits, if you happen to live in remote Saskatchewan. You shouldn't be disadvantaged. But I'm yet to see something that makes me think technology is a replacement. I don't think [an equivalent to] a computer game has the ability to inspire a child in the same way an enthusiastic, patient teacher can. If a computer game gets too difficult, you put it down. But in music that's the point when the real learning starts. The notion of software democratising musical education leaves me cold. I get cold feelings when I see: "Log on to our website and learn to play the violin."

There's a rush to teach kids to code. Do we risk musical training being ignored as technology education comes to the fore?

It will be interesting in 10 or 15 years when a digitally native generation is devising the curriculum. I'd be fascinated to see if something is taken out of the curriculum to replace it with coding skills. But if you ask me the hypothetical: if you were to teach coding or music, which would it be, I would absolutely say music.

Why?

It's a holistic thing. It's team-building. It's about sharing. The best thing about music education is simply that it teaches you to think and listen in a sensitive way, and not jump to conclusions in exchange for instant gratification. Real life doesn't give you 10 points when you cross a bridge. And that is a super-important thing. If we game-ify an art form, we risk losing its most valuable facets.

Peter Gregson will talk about the future of musicianship at the Saturday morning session of FutureFest

• FutureFest
• Classical music
• Programming
• Twitter
• Software
• Games
• Music
• Internet

Tom Lamont
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With pornography accounting for huge volumes of internet traffic, it's a subject ripe for analysis. But a new journal, Porn Studies, is causing outrage among campaigners against hardcore porn

When the Guardian announced the planned launch next year of Porn Studies – the world's first peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject – there were more than a few guffaws. "You can just see a future University Challenge," wrote one commenter online. "Carruthers, King's College Cambridge, reading pornography."

"It just sounds like a highbrow wank mag to me," wrote another. "One which I look forward to perusing." Even the headline had a touch of Viz magazine's Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres about it, suggesting it was a "new discipline" for academics.

What it concealed, however, is a bitter and contentious academic war over the status and nature of porn research, a war that is almost as bitter and contentious as the status and nature of porn itself.

Because, in many ways, this was the week that anti-porn campaigners have been waiting for. On 7 June, campaigners working to amend the extreme pornography laws brought in as part of the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act to include a full ban on pornographic depictions of rape – which are currently legal if uploaded abroad – succeeded in putting pressure on David Cameron, who last week called on Google to crack down on the kind of sites that "pollute the internet".

On Tuesday, calls for sex and relationship education to become a compulsory part of the national curriculum were made in the debate for the children and families bill. On Thursday, Labour introduced a debate in the Commons calling for search engines to change their default options to exclude porn. And on Friday, Google announced, ahead of a meeting with culture secretary Maria Miller and other internet companies tomorrow, that it would be donating £1m to the Internet Watch Foundation, a Cambridge-based body that attempts to police the internet for illegal content.

The issue of porn – what's out there, who's watching it, what effect it has – hasn't been as live as this for years. Last month, the children's commissioner for England published a report on the effect of porn on young people, reviewing 40,000 pieces of research, and found a correlation between violent pornography and those who commit violent crimes.

And the recent trials of Stuart Hazell, who was convicted for killing 12-year-old Tia Sharp, and Mark Bridger for killing April Jones made that link real and visible to many. They both were found to have violent pornography on their computers, Bridger watching it just hours before he abducted and killed the five-year-old.

In many ways, it would seem like exactly the right time to launch an academic journal solely devoted to porn studies. Edited by Feona Attwood, a professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University, and Clarissa Smith, a reader in sexuality and culture at Sunderland, their idea is to bring a focus to the current work being done into pornography in all different fields and gather it all into one place.

As porn has proliferated in the age of the internet, so it transpires has the number of academics studying it. "We became aware that more and more academics were writing about this sort of thing. But there was no one place where it was being gathered together," says Attwood.

"We ran a conference last year called Sexual Cultures and had delegates from 21 countries, and people were really enthusiastic. We just felt that the time had come."

According to some estimates, 30% of all internet bandwidth is used to transfer porn. Each month, porn sites get more visitors than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. And yet, says Attwood, in her own field, cultural studies, it's been mostly ignored. "Television, film, magazines have been studied from all sorts of angles. Something like the BBC has been investigated to death by historians, by people who analyse labour conditions, everything from accountancy to filming, but there's never been anything like that for porn.

"One of the reasons why I started thinking it would be a good idea to have a journal was meeting a French business studies academic at a conference who said, 'Oh, I've been thinking about porn in relation to business, but I can't tell any of my colleagues about what I'm doing. Where can I publish?'"

There are "tons of papers" out there, she says, though much of the current research "tends to do the same thing over and over again. It just asks the same questions. Is porn harmful? Is it linked to other things? Then it doesn't define what porn is and, if it finds the link, it doesn't really explain anything. There's a lot written and very little known."

Particularly among large swaths of the public. When I meet Attwood and Smith to talk about porn, I'm coming from a not exactly expert knowledge base. I talk later to Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University, who has been working with the Campaign to End Violence Against Women, and she refers to a "generational" problem of awareness about porn. She's right about that. When I was a teenager the most explicit material I remember seeing was when I watched A Room With a View with a couple of friends and we paused it and rewound to watch Julian Sands emerging naked from a pond.

I know. Even to me, that feels like at least a century ago, possibly more. McGlynn says there's a profound difference between those who grew up before the internet and those who came later. "People who are my age, in their 40s, or even 30s, generally have no idea. Unless they're avid users of pornography, they just don't realise quite what's out there and how easy it is to watch. The technology has changed so rapidly even in the last few years. Most people think you have to hunt it out, or download it, or use a credit card. They don't realise it's freely available on all mainstream porn sites. Whereas young people do. All my students know exactly what's out there."

To many people, particularly parents, the spread of ever more violent pornography is a huge concern, though Attwood and Smith don't buy the idea that it is getting more violent, or even that it is a huge concern. Smith puts it in the context of previous "moral panics". She says: "The idea the boundary is constantly being moved in one direction isn't necessarily accurate because there's so much pushing back. There isn't a clearly discernible movement of more and more stuff becoming more and more permissible."

To say that this is a contentious position is a massive understatement. And it's one of the reasons why 880 people have signed an online petition questioning the integrity of the journal and accusing it of bias. They're calling on Routledge, the respected academic publisher producing the journal, to answer questions about its "intention and focus" and its "editorial board which is uniformly pro-porn".

Behind the petition are the campaigning group Stop Porn Culture, who refer to themselves as "a group of academics, activists, anti-violence experts, health professionals, and educators". While they "agree that pornography and porn culture demand and deserve more critical attention" they claim that the journal is operating "under the auspices of neutrality" when it has a pro-porn bias and "further fosters the normalisation of porn".

I ask Attwood and Smith if they were surprised by the petition. "We knew that there would be some reactions against the journal, because it's a controversial area," says Smith. "But there have been far fewer than I expected. I think one of the things that I've been really pleased about it is how little antagonism we've had from other academics."

Well, not that little. When I ring Gail Dines, a British professor of sociology at Boston's Wheelock College and a major figure in porn academia (she is author of Pornland and a co-founder of Stop Porn Culture), she is spitting. Attwood and Smith are "akin to climate change deniers," she says.

"They're leaping to all sorts of unfounded conclusions. It's incredibly important that we study the porn industry, porn culture, porn's effect on sexual identities. It's become a major part of our lives. But these editors come from a pro-porn background where they deny the tons and tons of research that has been done into the negative effects of porn.

"They are cheerleaders for the industry. And to offer themselves as these neutral authorities is just laughable. Have a journal but you've got to have a plurality of voices on the editorial board and there simply isn't. There's a pornographer on it, for God's sake [Tristan Taormina]. There are so many studies out there that show how porn is getting more and more violent, which show that the more porn boys watch, the more traditionally sexist attitudes they develop towards women.

"And yet these women editing the journal say, 'Oh the research isn't there.' Yes it is! There's tons of it. They just haven't read it."

What's apparent is just how passionately held the views are on both sides, or as Attwood puts it: "We operate in an area which is really bifurcated." They defend the make-up of the editorial board. Yes, they do have a "pornographer" on the board of a peer-reviewed journal, but she's a "very well-known figure in sexuality studies", says Attwood. She's a sex educator, has edited a book on feminist pornography as well as making porn films, she adds. Smith says the rest of the board reflects "people we know that we've worked with in the past, but it's not about politics. They're enthusiastic about the journal and want to get it off the ground. But the editorial board is not fixed. These things change over time."

Routledge has also defended them in the face of the attacks: "The proposal for Porn Studies was reviewed by six experts in the field, and we have every confidence that the editors and board are equally committed to our values." What's more, Attwood and Smith say it's inaccurate to call them pro-porn. I point out to Smith that she has made pro-porn statements. "There's a quote for example where you say that you're 'politically motivated' to show that porn can be enjoyed."

"Porn is important to people on all kinds of levels, but, if you want people to be honest or to tell you things about their engagements with pornography, you have to be prepared to listen," she says. "I am politically motivated about the fact that people who look at porn are not all lizard people."

She's right, of course. The sheer numbers involved mean that of course, it's not all "lizard people". And they both say that figuring out why people enjoy porn "and what they are doing and feeling and thinking" is essential.

The problem, says Attwood, is that "so many things have become accepted as true but actually there's no hard evidence. It's become accepted that girls now shave off all their pubic hair because they've seen porn films, that porn is becoming more violent to women, that everyone under the age of 10 has seen it. There's very little evidence, solid, robust evidence, but it's become part of the conventional wisdom that we know these things. We don't know these things."

Dines practically blows her top though when I tell her this. "That's complete crap! Why are young girls taking off all their pubic hair? We know it's because of porn. Because boys can't bear it. Women's mags are telling them every week to be clean down there. I talk to counsellors and anal rape is almost as prevalent as vaginal rape on campuses now. Where is that coming from?

"There is so much evidence about the effect that porn is having. We know that it's becoming more violent. The definitive piece of research from 2010, which analysed the top 50 sites and DVDs, found that 90% of all content included physical or verbal abuse against women. That's proper empirical evidence-based research. But that is not what these women do. Their research is not evidence-based."

It would be easy to write this off as a spat between academics, but Fiona Elvines of Rape Crisis South London, who has been campaigning to amend Section 63 of the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act – which deals with extreme pornography – and to include relationships education on the national curriculum, says that the sort of statements Attwood and Smith make fly in the face of "the lived experience of real women and men on the ground".

She's had her own personal experience of the academic porn wars. "I have been at conferences where Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith have challenged stuff I've said. We work with survivors, and we are seeing the harms of pornography every day in our work and they say, 'It's not in the research.' But this is practice-based evidence from frontline services.

"We are having lots of women talking about being raped and being filmed and that being used as a method for silencing them, but that will take a while to make it into the research papers.

"They're told that, if they go to the police, the footage will be posted online. We see porn being used by child abusers to groom them. My concern is the kind of knowledge we have isn't seen as valid because the editors have a pro-porn slant and it will silence dissenting voices."

Talking about porn with Attwood and Smith in the civilised surroundings of Middlesex University is one thing. Hanging out on porn sites on the internet, quite another. The day after meeting Attwood and Smith, there is a story in the Mail about "rape porn". Sites that show actual rape and child abuse are banned under existing pornography legislation (though policing the hundreds of websites to ensure this is another matter), but though it has been illegal since 1959 to publish pornographic "portrayals of rape" in the UK, it's not if they're uploaded abroad.

It's this loophole that the Campaign to End Violence Against Women has been working on. And this week has seen significant breakthroughs, with both David Cameron and Ed Miliband speaking out about the need to crack down on sites hosting such material.

Because, while it's illegal to possess images of children being abused, Elvines points out that "it's completely legal to use a small, young-looking woman who's 18, made up to look like a schoolchild, and show her being abducted and taken to a parking lot and raped".

A summit with several major internet companies has been called for tomorrow to discuss measures that they might voluntarily adopt. It's an encouraging development, says Elvines, "though we believe that Cameron is trying to pass the buck. We believe that legislation is also required."

What people don't realise, she says, is how much pornographic material now is violent. Rape Crisis South London carried out simple research that involved typing "free porn" into Google and then quantified the results: 86% of sites that came up advertised videos depicting the rape of under-18s, 75% involved guns or knives, 43% showed the woman drugged, and 46% purported to be incest rape.

It's true. People don't realise. Or at least I didn't. After reading the Mail article, I type "rape porn" into Google to find more articles on the subject. But "rape porn" doesn't bring up articles on the subject. It brings up videos of women being raped.

All but one of the top five results on Google are for mainstream porn sites that host videos – click, click, and you're there – of women being raped by men. There's vaginal rape, oral rape, anal rape, often all three together. Some of the videos are "simulated", acted, and some of them aren't. They show actual women being actually raped.

Maybe you already knew that. I use the internet every day but I didn't. Does that make me naive? A prude? Possibly both.

But, when I talk to my friends – female, it's true, and like me, in their 40s, so also from the Age of Cluelessness – they have no idea either.

I watch a drunk Japanese teenager filmed on a shaky cameraphone followed through a station and on to a train. She collapses in a corner, is manoeuvred into the toilet by Mr Cameraphone, where he and his friend take turns to rape her. If it's a performance, then she does a better impression of a drunk than any Hollywood actor I've ever seen.

"Rape porn", and then two clicks of the mouse, and that's what's there. It's not skulking in some dark recess of the internet, it's a dropdown box on one the most popular porn sites in the world, but my experience – of not knowing, and not really wanting to know – is not unusual. There's a collective, willed ignorance of porn.

The nature of it, the accessibility of it, the preponderance of it has changed so fast that a lot of people simply haven't kept up. Huge numbers of us, including most of the mainstream press, have drawn a polite veil over the subject, except at a largely theoretical level.

Because the debate about porn – whether certain types of porn should be legislated against, who gets to decide, what we're allowed to watch in our own homes – is part of a wider debate about censorship and internet freedoms.

Laurie Penny, a hip, young feminist commentator, who surely grew up with more interesting viewing than A Room With a View, cautions against state censorship of online porn, writing in last week's issue of the New Statesman that, having "watched a great deal of pornography in the name of research and recreation, I can assure you that not all of it is violent", and says that she does not "want to live in a world where the government and a select few conservative feminists get to decide what we may and may not masturbate to".

But there are also independent voices outside the libertarian debate. Two weeks ago, the children's commissioner for England, an independent body that has been carrying out an in-depth two-year inquiry into the exploitation of children by gangs and groups, published a report summarising the current research on porn.

Sue Berelowitz, the deputy commissioner, tells me that it was because porn kept on coming up in the evidence they were hearing.

"We identified a lot of young people who were doing things that it's difficult to imagine they had dreamed up unless they had seen it somewhere. We had an 11-year-old girl who was raped by 10 14- 15-year-old boys, for example, and one of them said in his witness statement to the police that it was like being in a porn film."

The 40,000 research papers analysed by the report found "a correlation" between the viewing of pornographic material and those who carry out those violent acts.

"It's also clear that children's attitudes to sex and sexuality are being affected, sometimes at a very young age. This material is just a few clicks away. There might be parental controls on the computer at home, but it's right there on their phones. And it's affecting them. We're seeing that."

The academic debate over porn will no doubt rumble on. And Attwood and Smith are perhaps right in that it needs to go much much further than a "ban porn/don't ban porn" level. Porn is so diverse because humans are. It's also just another area of life in which technology is outpacing our ability to process it. The free streaming porn sites are only a few years old, and the era of children with smartphones in the school playground is even more recent. Or, as Sarah Green of the Campaign to End Violence Against Women, puts it, we're only just beginning "a global experiment with our children. And we don't know what the results will be."

It's not my generation or even Laurie Penny's who'll live with the consequences. It's the 11-year-olds. The 12-year-olds. The 13-year-olds. The ones who are typing "free porn" into their friend's phone right about now.

• Pornography
• Sex
• Maria Miller
• Newspapers & magazines
• Academic experts
• Internet
• Relationships
• Child protection

Carole Cadwalladr
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Brushing up your cyber-hygiene, maintaining intimacy haptics with your partner, and engineering your personal environment are going to be vital

Ideas and technologies are changing the world. As they develop we experience new emotions, perform new tasks and relate to the world, our friends and colleagues in unfamilar ways. Here are some of worlds and terms that may helps us navigate through the ever-changing newness.

Supercapturing

Imagine the office of the future, where cameras constantly scan your desk for anything you place upon it. Put a magazine down, or open a newspaper, and it will be scanned, indexed, and processed for you. In our CCTV-lined future, everything will be a scanner.

Cyber-hygiene

The most important life skill we'll be teaching our children over the coming decades will be cyber-hygiene. Fighting infections in the 21st century is less about washing your hands and more about not clicking on untrusted email attachments. Those of us who don't understand this will be shunned as digitally unclean.

Intimacy haptics

Technology can enable us to stay in contact, and in a literal way, in touch, with our loved ones. The Couple app for the iPhone allows private messaging between only two people, and also offers a "thumb-kiss" feature, where both phones will vibrate if the couple are touching the same place on their screens at the same time. The next generation will find this sort of "ambient intimacy" just as natural as holding hands.

Personal environment engineering

Computers have a weird effect on our brains. For example, the blue-white light of most screens acts like the sun and causes us to stay awake after dark. So new devices will be designed to combat this. Apps such as f.lux for the Mac change the colour of your screen during the evening to match the natural light outside, so that it's easier to sleep when you're done. There are sound apps too: Coffitivity.com streams an endless loop of coffee shop background noise to your headphones, to help you stay focused while you work.

Attention focusing

There are times that we're better off disconnected. Apps such as Self Control are being released which block internet access so that you can actually get things done. The next big trend is the emergence of devices without any internet access at all. Our kids may prize disconnection in the same way we seek out Wi-Fi.

Personal remote presence drones

Not really up for the commute in the morning? Want to attend a lecture, but find yourself on another continent? Not to worry. The first examples of the remote presence drone – a humanoid robot controlled via the internet with a videoconferencing screen in its head – are just entering the shops now, and in a decade or two could easily be commonplace. Your kids could stay in bed while they guide their drones to school, their faces looking out of its head as they gaze at their laptops.

Device etiquette

The next generation will be completely relaxed in the manners that surround technology, such as one new Silicon Valley habit: when you go to a bar with friends, everyone takes out their smartphone and places it in the centre of the table. The first one to touch their handset has to pay for all the drinks.

Engineered serendipity

Google is a great company for a catchphrase. Its latest is "engineered serendipity". The company's new service, Google Now, aims to learn all about you, so as to improve its suggestions. As our online behaviour, and the contents of our emails and documents, goes to feed these artificial intelligences, the more useful they will become. With their entire lives online, our children may soon be aided, guided and minded over by artificial intelligences, nudging them in useful directions.

Ben Hammersley, the author of Now for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear, will be talking about the coming security structures of a radically open century at the Saturday afternoon session of FutureFest

• FutureFest
• Internet
• Relationships
• Google
• Computing
• Computer science and IT
• Apps
• Smartphones

Ben Hammersley
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Students from state schools outperform private ones admitted with same A-level grades, according to Cardiff and Oxford Brookes research

Two studies showing state school pupils do better at university than those from private schools will strengthen demands for admissions tutors to give priority to applicants from comprehensives. The findings, from two separate universities, reveal that students from state schools gained better degrees than independently educated candidates with the same A-level grades.

The internal studies, which have been obtained by the Observer under the Freedom of Information Act, give ammunition to those who support giving special consideration, such as lower A-level offers, to comprehensive school candidates at elite institutions.

A separate report by Alan Milburn, the government's social mobility adviser, to be published on Monday, will show that the numbers of working-class entrants to prestigious universities has stalled.

This follows demands this month from Professor Les Ebdon, director of the Office for Fair Access, which promotes equality of opportunity for potential students, for more action from the most selective universities to attract those from deprived backgrounds.

Despite record amounts of funding for improving access, the most advantaged 20% of young people are still eight times more likely to end up at a leading university than the most disadvantaged 20%.

In the research, admissions tutors at Cardiff University, one of the Russell Group's 24 leading universities, commissioned an analysis of the progression and degree results of students from deprived neighbourhoods. As part of the analysis, which looked at student records since 2005, researchers pinpointed other factors that influenced how Cardiff's undergraduates performed.

One of the characteristics, along with differences such as age, gender and ethnicity, was the type of school attended. "All other factors being held constant, students from independent schools tend to do less well than students from comprehensive schools," the study said.

A second study, from Oxford Brookes University, produced similar evidence. Students who had been to state schools and further education colleges were more likely to complete their degrees. They were also more likely to get a good degree, classed as a first or 2:1, than their privately educated counterparts, with the attainment gap growing wider for undergraduates with A-level grades of CCC or below.

The findings from Oxford Brookes, which has a higher proportion of applicants and entrants from private schools than the average, have influenced the university's decision to set a target to increase the proportion of state school entrants and make lower offers to some candidates from deprived backgrounds.

Internal documents from the university stated: "If you take applicants with the same grades, studying the same course, one from an independent school and the other from a state school, the student from the state school would, on average, outperform their independent school counterpart by as much as seven degree points.

"Here there is a strong case to offer a place with one or two lower A-level grades to students from a particularly disadvantaged background knowing that, on average, their achievement would at least match that of an independent school individual."

The studies back up earlier research by the University of Bristol and the Sutton Trust education charity. The Bristol research, published in 2010, is widely quoted to justify access measures but leading independent schools have dismissed it as flawed because it looked at only a proportion of Bristol students when the university was being boycotted by several private schools.

The new studies make it harder for the private sector to argue against schemes which give priority to state school pupils. They also suggest that the educational boost provided by attending a fee-paying school is not necessarily maintained in a university setting, where independent study is a vital ingredient.

Shabana Mahmood, the shadow universities and science minister, said: "These reports add weight to the case for contextual data being given greater consideration in admissions. Although many universities already use contextual data, it is not yet mainstream activity.

"As many recent reports have shown, and as Professor Ebdon has recently highlighted, we need to see more progress in universities increasing recruitment of students from poorer backgrounds. The use of contextual data could play a greater role in allowing higher education to fulfil its potential as a true powerhouse of social mobility."

Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said: "The benefits gained by paying to attend a private school eventually wear off. Independent schools have denied the evidence that state school pupils do better, grade for grade, than their independent school counterparts, but it is there.

"Being accepted for a course at university is not a prize for what you have done in the past; it is a recognition of what you are likely to achieve in the future. That is why it is right that admissions tutors consider more than A-level grades."

• Access to university
• Private schools
• Schools
• Students
• Higher education

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Moocs, the new model of university education, have no race, colour, sex or wealth barriers, and can be accessed at a click

The past few centuries have witnessed revolutions in virtually every area of our world – health, transport, communications and genomics, to name but a few. But not in education. Until now, that is, with the advent of Moocs (massive open online courses).

Moocs are transforming education in both quality and scale. As president of edX, the only non-profit Mooc provider, I have the privilege of being part of this revolution. It's the most exciting time in education in decades.

One way Moocs have changed education is by increasing access. Moocs make education borderless, gender-blind, race-blind, class-blind and bank account-blind. Up to now, quality education – and in some cases, any higher education at all – has been the privilege of the few. Moocs have changed that. Anyone with an internet connection can have access. We hear from thousands of students, many in under-served, developing countries, about how grateful they are for this education.

Moocs are also improving the quality of education. Online learning promotes active learning, where the learner watches videos and engages in interactive exercises. At edX, our team has focused on capturing this element of online learning through an innovative user interface. Moocs and online learning also enable instant feedback through automatically graded exercises, self-paced learning through the ability to pause or rewind videos, peer learning through online discussion forums, and the application of gaming mechanisms to virtual laboratories.

But why is this transformation happening now? A confluence of factors has contributed to a perfect storm for learning. While, over a decade ago at MIT, Eric Grimson and Tomás Lozano-Pérez experimented with "interleaved" videos and online exercises in a flipped class model — in which the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice – it took video and content distribution networks, cloud computing and social networking to produce the right environment to support the huge worldwide enrolments we see in Moocs. The old ways of funnelling a small number of privileged or lucky students into traditional higher education will go. Moocs are democratising education. We have seen teenagers who lacked top educational pedigrees obtain perfect scores in demanding online courses. Some are now getting the opportunity to pursue higher education. Through Moocs, many more talented people in the world can take part in great learning.

I do not believe online education can replace a college experience, but the days of the old ways of teaching are numbered. Students have always been critical of large lecture halls where they are talked at, and declining lecture attendance is the result. But today we see that there is deep educational value in interactive learning, both online and in the classroom. Colleges and universities are beginning to use Moocs to make blended courses where online videos replace lectures, and class time is spent interacting with the professor, teaching staff and other students. Blended courses can produce good results. Last autumn San Jose State University used course material from edX. The percentage of students required to retake the course dropped from 41% to 9%. So how many people are we reaching? We were overwhelmed by the response to our pilot course in early 2012 on circuits and electronics – 155,000 students from 162 countries signed up. This sent a clear signal that the world was ready for online education and hungry for knowledge. We now have one million students from 192 countries. Delivering knowledge to otherwise excluded populations is just part of what Mooc providers do to change education. Research is another.

EdX and its partner universities are using the data we collect throughout a class to research how students learn most effectively, and then apply that knowledge to both online learning and traditional on-campus teaching. At MIT and Harvard, researchers David Pritchard, Lori Breslow and Andrew Ho have been studying how people learn. Pritchard computes that the data from the first prototype course alone – one my colleagues and I taught on circuits and electronics – is staggering and would fill 110,000 books. We recorded every click. All 230 million of them.

Using the data we gathered, we found that more than half of our students in the circuits and electronics class started working on their homework before watching video lectures. It appears that students get more excited about learning when they try to puzzle out a problem. In such classes, we are now looking at whether professors should assign homework before the lecture, instead of after.

Another way technology has driven these revolutionary changes in education is through using artificial intelligence to help teachers effectively assess students' work. Last month we unveiled our experimental assessment tool, which combines AI assessment, peer assessment and self-assessment, to provide professors with the tools to grade open-ended questions in a massively scaled environment. We also piloted cohort technology on our platform, which is a way for instructors to divide the large discussion forums into smaller, more intimate sub-groups.

We are part of a movement that seeks to change the face of education. In April we announced that our entire learning platform would be released as an open source on 1 June, and that Stanford University, along with Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and others, would start collaborating with us to continue to improve the platform. We are looking forward to universities and developers everywhere enhancing the platform that powers our edX courses.

I love teaching. I love teaching at a university, and I love teaching anyone who has a desire to learn. Everything I knew about learning (and therefore teaching) is a moving target now. I am like a kid in a candy shop when I think about what our research will show. I look forward to being surprised. Lao Tzu said: "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." It's time for teachers to rethink learning methods. I invite everyone along for the exhilarating ride.

• Internet
• TED
• University teaching

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Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg to issue challenge over free schools as party joins battle with Michael Gove

More than 5,000 untrained teachers who have been allowed to work in academies and free schools under Michael Gove's education reforms will be sacked if Labour wins the next election, unless they gain a formal qualification within two years.

The proposal is one of several to be announced by the shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg, as the opposition joins battle with Gove.

In a speech in which he will say he will work to ensure that every child has a place in a good school, Twigg will also say it is "unacceptable" for a government that professes to be driven by a desire to raise standards to allow teachers with no training to work in state-funded schools.

"It is shocking that this government is allowing unqualified teachers into the classroom," Twigg said. "High-quality teaching is the most important factor in improving education. We need to drive up the quality of teaching, not undermine it."

If Labour forms the next government, it will ensure that unqualified teachers get access to training in the first two years and will encourage heads to make time for them to become qualified. But if they have failed to do so by the end of that time, they will lose their jobs.

The move was welcomed by teaching unions, who said Gove's approach had devalued the profession and let down both pupils and parents.

The latest figures published by the Department for Education (DfE) show there are now 5,300 unqualified equivalent full-time teachers in academies and free schools.

Gove announced in 2010 that the country's free schools – which now number 80 and are outside the control of local authorities but funded by the state – would be allowed greater leeway over appointments, meaning that teaching qualifications were not necessary.

Last summer, he extended this to academies – now more than half of all secondary schools – claiming that, by removing the requirement for staff to have qualified teacher status, schools would be able to show the same "dynamism" that he believes drives success in private schools.

The DfE under Gove has also announced that former soldiers without degrees will be fast-tracked into teaching in England under a programme called the Troops to Teachers scheme.

A DfE source dismissed Twigg's arguments and insisted greater flexibility meant the best state schools could hire gifted people. He said: "We are raising the standards required to qualify for taxpayer-funded training. However, we also need flexibility to allow brilliant teachers from private schools or abroad to teach in state schools.

"It would be stupid to stop brilliant teachers who want to be able to switch from private to state schools from doing so. Having qualified teacher status and being qualified to teach are very different things."

However, the teaching unions countered by saying it was just a cost-cutting exercise that delivered state education on the cheap. Chris Keates, general secretary of the largest teachers' union, the NASWUT, applauded Twigg's intention to reverse Gove's policy. She said: "Quite honestly, it was a gross betrayal of parents and children when this government removed the requirement for teachers to be qualified.

"People would be horrified if they had done this for lawyers, doctors or dentists. Most parents would expect their children to be taught by people who are qualified, and it is a good move by Labour to reaffirm the importance of qualified teacher status. We have been shocked how widespread the use of unqualified teachers is now. We should never have been put in this position."

Mike Griffiths, headteacher of an academy in Northampton and vice-president of the Association of School and College Leaders union, said he also welcomed Labour's acknowledgement that teaching was a skilled profession.

Earlier this year the Observer revealed that Pimlico free school in Westminster, which is due to open in September, had employed a 27-year-old who had not completed her training as headteacher. Annaliese Briggs, a former thinktank director who advised the coalition government on its national primary curriculum, is understood to have been receiving training in preparation for the start of the new school year.

She has said that she will ignore the national curriculum and teach lessons "inspired by the tried and tested methods of ED Hirsch Jr", the controversial American academic behind what he calls "content-rich" learning.

Twigg, who has been accused by some in the Labour party of being slow off the mark to challenge Gove, added: "Labour wants to see more talented people come into teaching. That's why in government we invested in improved conditions for teachers and funded initiatives like Teach First.

"Michael Gove damages standards by allowing unqualified teachers. Under Labour all teachers in all state-funded schools would have, or have to acquire, qualified teacher status."

• Schools
• Teacher training
• Teaching
• Free schools
• Academies
• Michael Gove

Daniel BoffeyToby Helm
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We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past which are no longer relevant on a curriculum for today's children

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don't think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: "Google is full of junk."

In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else's work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school.

The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: "We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to."

One of the teachers who works with me said to her class of nine-year-olds: "There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can't see, can you figure out what it is?" The children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. This is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups' work and so on.

One of them says: "Aren't we going to do any work?"

"What do you think you were doing?" asks the teacher.

"Learning about electromagnetism."

"What's work, then?"

"Work is when you say things to us and we write them down."

Methods from centuries ago may seem romantic, but they do get obsolete and need to be replaced. The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the "good old days". It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.

Any standard room in a Holiday Inn is better than the best facilities in an emperor's room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution. Beating children into submission will not solve the problem of educational disengagement.

If examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. "Where did language come from?", "Why were the pyramids built?", "Is life on Earth sustainable?", "What is the purpose of theatre?"

Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. AThat's a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

In this kind of self-organised learning, we don't need the same teachers all the time. Any teacher can cause any kind of learning to emerge. A teacher does not need to be physically present, she could be a projected, life-sized image on the wall. A "Granny Cloud" of such volunteer teachers have been operating out of the UK and a few other countries into schools in India and South America for more than five years, using a combination of the internet and admiration to provide a meaningful education for children. We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated "disciplines", connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children.

Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, and the winner of the $1m TED Prize 2013. He devised the Hole in the Wall experiment, where a computer was embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi for children to use freely. He aimed to prove young people could be taught computers easily without formal training.

• Exams
• Online learning
• Schools
• Internet
• TED

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Dozens of groups aiming to open free schools next year are meeting to get tips from pioneers of the movement, the West London Free School.

The head of Ofsted has warned that underachieving young people could be more susceptible to joining organisations such as the English Defence League, as low skilled jobs become more difficult to secure.

    

Yet more upheaval is on the horizon, but the Secret Teacher fears English education is stuck in a rut

If the constant kvetching over the GCSE reforms has taught us anything this week, it's that there are bigger problems than Mr Gove's latest filibuster.

This is to take nothing away from the latest mini-catastrophe. The GCSE is Gove's latest O-level proposal/political show pony. Nominally watered down and tweaked slightly, but pushed through regardless. Designed to "restore rigour" and other meaningless, but impressive sounding hyperbole. Reducing subjects to a one-day recall test at the end of a two-year course regresses our country's education to the 1980s or earlier. Which has been the intent all along from Mr Gove, so he is to perhaps be lauded for his consistency.

But pragmatically, there's an election in a year or so. It would seem likely that we will see a new secretary of state for education. And the two years or so of students who have been faffed about will hopefully see their courses change back to allow for some form of (stricter) modular assessment. The world will continue to turn, and what will we really have lost?

The answer, sadly, is a lot. Because, I'd like to let you into a secret here, we need to fundamentally change the way we educate students. Not the way Mr Gove has suggested, obviously. Although it has to be said he has provided both the "fun" and the "mental" for the last few years. But no, what we need is an overhaul of approach. A way of making education accessible to the different styles of learners, and students of different abilities that the 21st century has produced.

Change is hard enough to affect in the first place. Our unions, so useful in some ways, are hugely resistant to upheaval of any scale, let alone the major changes we need to make education relevant to preparing the 21st-century pupil for the world. They rightly voice our concerns on workload. And with the ever-shifting sands of qualifications – so far this proposed GCSE is the third or fourth incarnation – teachers are having their time wasted preparing for courses that they know are unlikely to live much past the next two years or so. On top of this there will be the increased demands of data tracking, real-time reporting, and whatever trend Ofsted has chosen for the given year.

And should we moan, we are labelled shirkers. Malingerers who are overpaid and have too much time off. We finish at 3pm every day, apparently, so what right have we to complain about a pay freeze? I long to teach in a country where educators are respected. But then perhaps if we complained less, that might go some way to improving our reputation.

It's a grim picture indeed. So I'm struggling to get too wound up about the latest GCSE change. It's another unwanted, poorly-researched change created for the wrong reasons. But if teaching in the UK has taught me anything, it's how to just get on with the job, and ride out the changes as best as I can. I'll spend summer planning my units of work and departmental policies. I might even go somewhere affordable for a week or so. And then I can return in September, ready to face the real rigour of the British educational system – more of the same old shit.

This week's Secret Teacher works at a secondary school in the south east of England.

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• Schools
• GCSEs
• Exams

The Secret Teacher
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Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation is launched at conference held at the London School of Economics

Students from British colleges and universities yesterday founded the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation. About 500 of them packed a lecture theatre on the first of the two-day founding conference at the London School of Economics.

Amid the jungles of revolutionary ideology, speakers grappled manfully with 1848, Rosa Luxemburg, the personality cult, worker hostility to students, and the sad sparsity of ranks and files.

No matter, though, for once more the keen-eyed had seen visions of a red dawn in the west and, not for the first time in history, one speaker even believed that "the death knell of capitalism has sounded". An Irish printer, Comrade Wise, of the Dalston branch of Sogat, a print union, handed over a cheque for £50. He appealed to the students not to be vicious, violent, or pull up paving stones. But he promised that if the newspapers misrepresented their case, he would do his best to bring the newspaper distribution workers out on strike.

In the first session ("Trends in capitalism") it was notable that activists like Messrs Tariq Ali, Pat Jordan and Paul Foot were present but not at the microphone (one revolutionary student even told the press: "Tariq Ali represents nobody but himself.")

A handout for the press emphasised once more that the aims of the federation are "opposition to the control of education by the ruling class, support of all anti-imperialist struggles and solidarity with national liberation movements, opposition to racialism and immigration control, and workers' power as the only alternative to capitalism."

One of the most warmly applauded speeches was from a left-wing journalist, Mr John Palmer, who said that for 20 years capitalist society had not been more clearly rent by contradictions. The federation would build bridges from the ghetto world of the student revolutionaries to the working classes. The heart attacks of modern capitalism would get more frequent and severe.

A Black Power spokesman told the "revolutionaries" to weed out those who were only interested in talking about revolution and then his organisation could co-operate with the RSSF. When he uncomfortably asked: "How many people sitting here know how to make a petrol bomb ?" a man shouted back, "How many want to ?"

Before the meeting there was a curious press conference, in which a student, who declined to be named or even described as a spokesman, said that the federation was not going to be just another Labour student organisation. It would not be committed to violence, though it might be necessary on occasion. He made the point, that was to become clearer later, that RSSF was more concerned with revolution in capitalist society as a whole than in mere student power.

• Student politics
• London School of Economics and Political Science
• 1968: the year of revolt
• Higher education

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Hard-working fathers are cutting their long working hours, while mothers are working more, researchers say.

Five head teachers have been knighted or made dames in this year's Queen's Birthday Honours.

Russell Group to have permanent role in dictating design and content of exams despite fears over Michael Gove's proposal

Britain's top universities will take a permanent role in dictating the design and content of A-levels after a deal with the Department for Education, in spite of concerns that the qualification will be reduced to a university entrance exam.

The agreement between the DfE and the Russell Group of leading universities comes after the education secretary, Michael Gove, invited universities earlier this year to have greater input into the redevelopment of A-levels. A-level exam content is currently set by examination boards and the DfE.

When Gove first made the proposals they were criticised by organisations including teaching unions, Universities UK, the 1994 Group and Cambridge University.

The Russell Group says the new body will take in the views of other universities and education groups, and urged ministers and awarding organisations to "continue to engage with a range of education bodies and learned societies" on A-levels.

According to a letter to Gove from Professor Nigel Thrift, the vice-chancellor of Warwick University and chair of a Russell Group working party, the group will establish a new body to be known as the A-level Content Advisory Body (Alcab) to co-ordinate input from university experts and specialists.

"We see a clear need for authoritative leading university input to the development of qualifications," Prof Thrift wrote to Gove, adding that the aim was for the Russell Group's contribution "to be as light-touch as possible, whilst sufficient to add real value to the design of A-levels."

In accepting the offer, Gove wrote: "Strong leadership from Russell Group universities, and engagement across the wider higher education sector, is critical to the future development of A-levels."

Under the new structure, Alcab will initially advise the qualifications regulator, Ofqual, on the content for A-level subjects that the Russell Group regards as "adequate preparation" for higher education admission: maths, advanced maths, English literature, physics, biology, chemistry, geography, history and modern and classical languages.

"Academics at our best universities have long been concerned that there are real problems with current A-levels. They say they do not equip students with the skills and knowledge needed for rigorous degree courses, including extended writing and research skills," said a DfE spokesman.

In practice, Alcab will set up a subject panel composed of academics and experts from its institutions and others to design the initial content of the new A-levels. Ofqual will retain its final say and accredit examination boards offering the exam.

The first of the new A-levels will be taught in classrooms from September 2015. Subjects undergoing more substantial change will be delayed until September 2016 to allow Alcab to conduct a content review.

The proposals had earlier been attacked for being too narrow. "A-levels need to test more than just the ability to go to university," said Mary Bousted, head of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers union.

• Higher education
• A-levels
• Schools
• Sixth form
• Exams
• Michael Gove

Richard Adams
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Britain's top universities will lead a major overhaul of A-levels amid fears the gold standard qualification is failing to prepare teenagers for the demands of higher education, the Telegraph has learnt.    

To be clear: this is what a government-appointed investment bank considers to be the best options for a sale of state assets

This week, the Guardian has published details of a government-commissioned plan to privatise student loans. This is a scheme the government would rather you didn't know about: while it has been the subject of speculation within higher education, it has never been made public or discussed with university professionals. When it was released after a Freedom of Information request, the vast majority was redacted; it was only because of the black ink used that the text could be read. To be clear: this week's story was not some politician's kite-flying – it revealed what a government-appointed investment bank considers to be the best options for a sale of state assets.

Which makes the details of the study all the more worrying. Because after months of testing market opinion, the bankers concluded that the conditions to protect graduates from paying too much on their debt were too big a deterrent for potential investors. No surprise there: a book of loans whose repayment depends on the future incomes of their borrowers might be judged to be privatising the unprivatisable. Nevertheless, the financiers gave it a good go.

One of their suggestions was to lift the cap on interest rates. Students taking out loans before 2012 pay either bank base rate plus 1% or RPI – whichever is lower. Lifting the cap sounds small, but at the moment it would more than double the interest rates paid by former students. For many graduates the change could add on extra years in the red. The retrospective change would breach primary legislation from 1998 that puts the cap in law – and contradict assurances from the university minister David Willetts and colleagues that the cap is safe.

Let us repeat: this proposal has not been disclosed by Vince Cable's department for business judges as it does not "lie in the balance of public interest" to do so. One can imagine the same being said by the officials who hatched the raid on Cypriots' bank accounts. The other suggestion is for taxpayers to bear the risks of a divergence between RPI and base rate through a financial product as a hedge. Either graduates are dumped with more risk or taxpayers are; investors get a safe return.

Mr Cable has not committed to following either suggestion; but neither has he taken them off the table. Selling the loan book is part of the government's hunt for state assets that they can sell now – no matter what the consequences. It also forms part of a process of turning British universities into a full-blown market. That method has not been fully disclosed or subject to proper scrutiny and debate. But some prospective elements, such as retrospectively changing the terms for people who left university years ago, should worry us all.

• Students
• Higher education

Editorial
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