Διεθνή Media

Oussouby Sacko is working to make a country with a declining population confront its traditional resistance to taking in foreigners.

A former chief of S&H (dispenser of Green Stamps), he was the first chairman of the park conservancy and helped create the Yale School of Management.

My former teacher and PhD supervisor, Maqbool Hasan Khan, who has died aged 79, was a professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University, northern India, and a bilingual literary critic. Greatly interested in western philosophy and Urdu literature, Maqbool wrote in both English and Urdu.

Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare criticism were Maqbool’s lifetime passion. He loved to quote Shakespeare in all situations and could discuss almost all major and minor Shakespeare critics. Though he wrote a book on Edward Dowden in the mid-80s, and essays on AC Bradley’s and Walter Raleigh’s Shakespeare criticism, his work is also full of interesting asides on other Shakespeare critics, including Coleridge, Granville-Barker, EE Stoll, LC Knights and G Wilson Knight. He obtained an MA in Shakespeare studies from the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University in 1974, after being awarded a British Council scholarship.

Continue reading...

Mobilisation des lycéens, passages des partiels, blocus des universités…, Le Monde Campus a dressé, dans un tchat, un état des lieux du mouvement étudiant.

My mother, Dorothy Temple, who has died aged 84, was successively head of the English department at Billericay school and academic deputy head at the Ursuline school in Brentwood, Essex.

Early in her career she taught in selective Catholic girls’ convent schools, the environment in which she herself had been educated. Billericay school, on the other hand, was a large, mixed-sex, mixed-ability, secular comprehensive. It had only recently been upgraded from secondary-modern status, and was settling down with some difficulty to the resulting changes.

Continue reading...

In wake of strikes in other states, Doug Ducey says he can free up $274m to pay for salary increase – but teachers say details are lacking

As recently as Tuesday, a defiant Arizona governor refused to meet teachers threatening to strike over low pay and said he was sticking with a 1% raise proposal. Now Republican Doug Ducey has managed to scrape together the funds for what he claims is a 20% rise for teachers by 2020.

Related: 'It's a turning point': Oklahoma teachers buoyed by success of 110-mile march

Continue reading...

Planned changes to staff pensions led to 14 days of strike action at 64 universities in February and March.

Ballot finds two-to-one majority in favour of accepting offer to reopen talks over pensions

The strike action that hit 65 universities across the UK this year is to end after staff voted to accept an offer to reopen negotiations with employers over their pensions.

The ballot of 50,000 University and College Union members in higher education found a two-to-one majority in favour of accepting the offer, which establishes a joint committee of experts to look at staff pensions provided through the University Superannuation Scheme (USS).

Continue reading...

Resistance comes as union says lack of funds is forcing vulnerable children out of schools

Families of children with special needs are joining forces to fund legal action against local authorities in England that are cutting budgets, after the teaching union said children who could not be supported were being taken out of schools.

Alicia McColl, whose 14-year-old son Kian has autism, raised £2,600 via the crowdsourcing website CrowdJustice to help pay for a judicial review of Surrey county council’s proposals to cut its special educational needs and disabilities (Send) budget by £20m. A similar challenge is under way in Hackney, London, watched closely by parents across the country who are also witnessing cuts.

Continue reading...

Sean Simpson, a chemistry teacher at the school in Parkland, Fla., left his handgun at a beach restroom, the police said. A homeless man found it and fired it.

Peter Horrocks says the university faces an "unprecedented" challenge as he announces his resignation.

Peter Horrocks quits following opposition to plans to reduce courses and lecturers

Peter Horrocks, the vice-chancellor of the Open University, has resigned following widespread opposition to plans to significantly reduce the number of courses the institution offers and the number of lecturers it employs.

The university said Horrocks would hand responsibility to an acting vice-chancellor but would remain employed as a consultant for another three months.

Continue reading...

My university is digitally tracking who turns up to class, but students are failing to show and lecturers feel spied on

My university has introduced a new method of monitoring student progress, a digital apparatus for tracking class attendance. Instead of students putting their initials on a register, they tap their ID cards on a card reader. The lecturer then navigates the university website to retrieve the tally – which is far more cumbersome than glancing at a sheet of paper. But that’s not the worst problem with the new system.

The digital attendance system is an educational software product, given a ridiculous tech startup-inspired name. It’s been bought in at considerable cost to the university to cover things like the installation of card readers in teaching rooms across the campus.

Continue reading...

Educators with disabilities can help make lessons more accessible to everyone at school – but many more are needed

For Kris Halpin, a disabled musician who delivers music lessons in schools, the thought of being in front of a room full of students used to be terrifying. But he knew what it would have meant to him at 14 to see someone with disabilities teaching his class.

“My experience in education [in the 1980s] was not immensely positive,” Halpin says. “I was bullied a lot at school because of my disability. Not by my peers but by the staff ... When I had to flag an access [problem], I was told I was only disabled when it suited me. It was not a supportive place to be. Music education was my one salvation.”

Continue reading...

Study says 40% of apprenticeship standards do not meet traditional on-the-job training definition.

Environ 200 étudiants avaient voté un peu plus tôt l’occupation du site, lors d’une assemblée générale.

• Manual provides ‘dos and don’ts’ for how to smear the strikes
  
• Top of the list: ‘teacher strikes hurt kids and low-income families’

A nationwide network of rightwing thinktanks is launching a PR counteroffensive against the teachers’ strikes that are sweeping the country, circulating a “messaging guide” for anti-union activists that portrays the walkouts as harmful to low-income parents and their children.

The new rightwing strategy to discredit the strikes that have erupted in protest against cuts in education funding and poor teacher pay is contained in a three-page document obtained by the Guardian. Titled “How to talk about teacher strikes”, it provides a “dos and don’ts” manual for how to smear the strikers.

Continue reading...

Readers respond to Polly Toynbee’s article on the failure of the government’s initiative to increase apprenticeships

Polly Toynbee (Going nowhere fast: the lie of apprenticeships, 9 April) provides a much-needed focus on the dire state of apprenticeship provision in England. The recent report of the Commission on London at King’s College London set out how to start tackling this. The mayor of London – and the regional mayors across England – need to be given new powers to manage the delivery of skills provision in their area. London should first be given a share of the unspent apprenticeship levy to manage as it sees fit. This will build on the current plans for the adult education budget to be given to the mayor. The mayor should then be given the job to provide strategic coordination to skills and apprenticeships across London, targeting crucial shortages, including construction, hi-tech and creative industries. Making skills a top priority for the mayor will help tackle the lack of status and esteem for apprenticeships and level the playing field in London with universities.
Tony Halmos
Director, Commission on London

• There is much truth in Polly Toynbee’s article. But the real lie is that apprenticeships are somehow superior to FE college courses. Even in practical subjects such as servicing motor vehicles or the construction trades, a college course offers a carefully structured progression through the elements of the subject, supplemented by development of practical skills in college workshops. Students are taught by staff who are dedicated to developing people and skills, rather than finishing a job to a given timescale. After a couple of years of a college course, students are ready for skilled employment or to go on to develop higher skills. It is a myth that an apprenticeship automatically offers better preparation.

Continue reading...

Readers respond to a Guardian editorial on the continuing trials and tribulations at the Open University

Your editorial (10 April) rightly notes that the problems facing the Open University are far greater than Peter Horrocks. You refer to the UCU vote of no confidence and our claim that he has lost the respect of staff. That is indeed the case. But it needs to be emphasised that over the past two weeks I have been part of the greatest single mobilisation of virtually unanimous feeling within a university that I have experienced in over 30 years working in higher education. “No confidence” and calls to resign with immediate effect have been articulated orally and by votes in a plethora of meetings, in letter-writing and via petitions in every quarter of the university – at every level. The message is unequivocal: if the Open University is to survive, a necessary condition is the resignation of the current vice-chancellor.
Professor Steve Tombs
Department of social policy and criminology, the Open University

• You are right to draw attention to the inadequacies of the present vice-chancellor and to draw a contrast with the deep loyalty and commitment of the staff of the OU. But in pointing to central government as being mainly responsible for the current difficulties, an important dimension of the OU is missed.

Continue reading...

My mother, Mary Sparks, who has died aged 82, was a much loved and inspiring teacher in Manchester schools. From an early age, she aspired to be a teacher, and started training at Sedgley Park college at the age of 18, going straight into work two years later; she used to joke that she was charged half fare on the bus when she first started, as the conductor thought she was one of the pupils. Her first teaching post was at one of the schools she had attended, the Hollies convent grammar school for girls, in Fallowfield. Later, she taught for a quarter of a century at St Catherine’s school, Didsbury.

Daughter of Kathleen (nee Lenaghan), a nurse, and Frank Worsley, a motor mechanic, Mary was born in Didsbury, the eldest of three children, and lived there for the rest of her life. She grew up in straitened financial circumstances, but in a supportive home where her mother had a strong belief in the transformative effect of education.

Continue reading...