Reading Time: 4 minutes I will now post three articles from Humanists UK that show things aren’t progressing in the UK the way secularists might hope. Sometimes it’s one step forward and two steps back. Humanists UK and the National Secular Society are fighting to counteract this – please support them: More religious groups apply to open free schools […]
Free Schools
Posted inEducation, The Secular
70 Rabbis challenge Chief Rabbi over religious selection in school admissions
Reading Time: 4 minutes School admissions have been a bone of contention of mine for a long time, especially having once worked in the faith school sector for about a decade. The UK is very different to places like the US. Here, in certain sectors, some 40% of our state schools are faith schools. This means that dioceses and […]
Posted inEducation, The Secular
Entirely the wrong direction of travel: Church of England announces 100 more church schools
Reading Time: 2 minutes From the BHA: The Church of England’s educational empire-building continues, with its recent announcement of plans to build more than 100 discriminatory Anglican ‘free schools’, which will have the legal right to select 50% of school places on the basis of religion. As if that weren’t bad enough, other major players in our sorry ‘faith’ […]
Posted inEducation, Politics
Academisation – A Non-Evidence-Based Ideological Crusade on Education. I Am Angry.
Reading Time: 18 minutes At last our schools will be “set free” by George Osborne. They’ll be “free from local bureaucracy”, no longer run by councils but governed instead by academies, such as the one set up by carpet millionaire Lord Harris. It seems incredible that up until now, no one has taken the obvious step of handing over […]
Posted inEducation, The Secular
New figures show 40% of latest Free School proposals were from faith groups
Reading Time: 3 minutes The BHA reports (and for those who do not know what “free schools” are, see here): The Department for Education (DfE) has now published the names, locations, and religious characters of all Free School applications from the ‘tenth wave’, revealing that two fifths of applications submitted were from faith groups. Defying repeated direction from the Information Commissioner’s […]
Posted inEducation, Politics
‘Free schools are a vanity project and a reckless waste of public money’
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Geoff Barton, headteacher of King Edward VI School in Suffolk, writes:
I drove in to work this morning listening to Radio 4’s Today programme. I wasn’t quick enough to avoid its regular Thought for the Day segment. But in a way I’m glad. Because straight afterwards education secretary Nicky Morgan came on, trying to defend the proposed expansion of the government’s “free schools” initiative.
From Thought for the Day to Platitude of the Day. Truly, the education secretary left no cliché unturned.
Posted inEducation, Politics
Government approves 12 new religious Free Schools
Reading Time: 2 minutes The BHA has released this: During a speech detailing Conservative plans to open 500 new free schools by 2020, David Cameron has today announced the approval of 49 new Free Schools due to open from September 2015 and beyond. This includes 12 new religious schools. The British Humanist Association (BHA) has again voiced its concern at the […]
Posted inEducation, Politics, The Secular
Free School praised by Michael Gove ordered to close due to bullying and religious bigotry
Reading Time: 3 minutes A Christian free school lauded by Education Secretary Michael Gove has been ordered to close after inspectors accused pupils of harbouring “prejudiced views” of children from other faiths which went unchallenged by their teachers.
Posted inEducation, Politics
The Perfect Storm : Gove’s Teacher Shortage
Reading Time: 12 minutes For those of you who are in the teaching profession, or who are interested in politics, and how Govian free market economics is trying to usurp education, then this is fascinating. It’s a tour de force, from Disappointed Idealist:
Something hideous this way comes. It’s a teacher shortage. Nothing new there, I hear you say. But this one is going to be a cracker, and it’s one which has been manufactured by Gove and his fellow travellers.
Posted inEducation, Politics
Woo hoo! Yes! Zippedy doo whoop!… Oh shit…
Reading Time: 2 minutes YES!!! GIVE IS OUT, GOVE IS OUT, WHOOP DE DOO, GOVE IS OUT. GOVE HAS GONE, GOVE HAS GONE, YAY YAY YAY, GOVE HAS GONE!