There was a period in the early 1960s when my parents had a television (in those days you rented) and one of the programs I liked to watch was All Our Yesterdays produced by Granada Television. It was a look back in time based on the newsreel footage of that week twenty-five years ago – a week-by-week journey through the…
In Hamelin in Lower Saxony. there’s an inscription on a wooden beam on the side of the Rattenfangerhaus (rat catcher’s house). An English translation on the plaque reads: In the year 1284 on the Day of John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper dressed in many-coloured clothes to Calvary…
It was Donald Winnicott, of course, who coined the phrase good-enough in connection with parenting. He first introduced the term in 1953 although he had worked on the concept for years and the idea is there in his advice to parents in his wartime radio broadcasts. Basically, it recognizes the need for children to learn that: a mother is neither…
I’ve just read Back To My Beginnings by Paddy Staplehurst. It’s a memoir of growing up in St. Etheldreda’s in Bedford – a home for girls that was run by Anglican nuns. Paddy and her younger sister Bille arrive in 1944 to join an older sister, Dawn, after being taken into care by Norfolk County Council because of persistent abuse.…
There I was I was minding my own business drinking an early morning cuppa in isolation, socially distanced and hunkered when there was a flash of lightning and a tremendous thunderclap right overhead. Just one, followed a quick pelt of rain. And because I was deep in The Black Death – the way one is in the novelty phase of…
This is a follow-up to The Queen of Mean and one of a series about Headlands Grammar School and what I remember and learned in my seven year sentence. By the time I got to the sixth form I had learned to keep below Miss Jacob’s radar and anyway she had younger fish to fry. Hundreds of them – all…
When Senior Mistress Miss A. Jacob retired from Headlands School Mr.Magson had this to say in the school magazine: Two comments about that: While I don’t doubt the truth of Magson’s words, I didn’t know then, and don’t know now, any student who had a good word to say about Miss Jacob. There’s a little collection of some of the…
The schools we attend and work in help shape the people we become. Seven of my sixty plus years in school were spent here – at Headlands Grammar School, Swindon. It is long gone and the site redeveloped. When people go into education as a career they sometimes seek to replicate the good experiences of their own schooling. Others dedicate…
Yeats wrote the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” (see Game of Swans) in 1916 /17 when he was staying with Lady Gregory at her home in Coole Park, Galway and feeling lovelorn. In 1919 he used the title for a collection of poems that he dedicated to her son – Major Robert Gregory – the Royal Flying Corps fighter…
Scooterons-nous vite. It’s Back to School with Angela Brazil Long before Harry Potter – and indeed long before all those school story authors who gave us Malory Towers and St. Clare’s and the Chalet School and the Abbey School and Jennings and Billy Bunter – there was Angela Brazil. Brazil – rhymes with dazzle – didn’t invent the school story…
I was intrigued when I discovered that I am distantly related to the last person beheaded in England. The year is 1817 and the place Derbyshire. Isaac Ludlam was one of three men executed at Derby gaol. His head was cut from his corpse and shown to the thousands in the crowd. This was not a story handed down in…
David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham. He made the speech and took the stand that many of us hoped that Jeremy Corbyn would lead the party with. Didn’t happen. If you follow British politics in any degree beyond zero then you may well have seen this video of David Lammy addressing the House of Commons on the shame…
The case against grades and grading has been so clearly made that it is time to turn the tables. Why – in 2019 – with all the evidence available – Why are institutions and individuals still clinging to this pernicious practice? Why do educators persist in wasting time discussing such irrelevancies as grading standards, grading formulas, grade inflation and what…
I thought of going back to France, but realised the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat…
If you’ve ever been young and full of dreams …. If you ever headed to the big city with your imagination teeming with the prospect of joining the generations of those who came before you and left their mark … this is a poem for you. Think Paris, New York, London – any great and storied city that has been…