My name is Dirk and I’m an avid reader of your blog and an advocate for education. I remember an article you have about holiday and school breaks and I thought this article might interest you. You can find it here: http://newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au/features/how-long-should-holidays-be/

Comedians guzzle wine and egg each other on to trade obscene jokes about the Queen, Philip and Susan Boyle

Romeo Beckham’s modelling debut won many column inches in the newspapers on Tuesday, but it has

Former EastEnders actress failed to

Mail on Sunday
 TV presenter Bear Grylls has backed a school’s programme to make children learn to deal with failure. A school that has introduced ‘lessons’ in failure to test the perseverance of children has been backed by Chief Scout and TV adventurer Bear Grylls.
Pupils at the independent Perse School in Cambridge are being challenged with physical and academic tasks that teachers do not expect them to achieve.
Ed Elliot, head of the £13,647-a-year school, said seeing ‘failure as your friend’ helped children to learn from their mistakes.
The activities for the pupils …

UK campaigners welcome French president’s ban plan. They are famous for their 35-hour working weeks and long lunch breaks dripping

Children as young as one are being labelled as having special educational needs by their nurseries, official figures show. Nearly 18,000…

Katy Morton Nursery World
A father of three children, whose birthdays are in the summer, is calling for more flexibility in the schools admission system.
When should children start school?
Stefan Richter has faced opposition from his local authority over wanting to defer his two-year-old daughter’s school entry by a year so that she can start reception after her fifth birthday at the end of August.
By law, children must start school by the term following their fifth birthday. Children born between 1 September 2008 and 31 August 2009 start school in September 2013.
Mr …

Hundreds of private schools are preparing to drop Labour’s controversial “nappy curriculum” amid claims it breaches parents’ human rights

By Richard Hartley-parkinson
Children should not have to start school until they are six to prevent early ‘adultification’, an academic has claimed.
Going against conventional wisdom that their intellect should be fed and stimulated early on, education expert Dr Richard House says that over-emphasis on the three Rs – reading writing and arithmetic – can actually cause long term damage.
The senior lecturer at Roehampton’s University for Therapeutic Education added that rather than starting school at the current standard age of four or five, those with ‘runaway intellect’ would do better if they …