Posts Tagged children
Real action for children
Posted by Annaliese Briggs in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 15/10/2010
On occasion, I arrived at school after the registration bell. My hair was a mess, my uniform rumpled and my lunchbox nearly empty. By today’s standards, I would have qualified as a neglected child.
Put that beer down!
Posted by James Gubb in Civil Liberty, Health on 29/01/2009
On the basis of a report by the CMO, Sir Liam Donaldson, the government has recommended that no child should drink before the age of 15; and that children between the 15-17 years should only drink under the supervision of adults.
Not exactly a cultural revolution
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 13/02/2008
School children are to be mandated 5 hours of ‘culture’ a week by the latest government initiative. This hour-per-school-day prescription seems to be the government’s answer to every education issue, as it defines more and more of every state school schedule through Whitehall guidance. This follows on from the five hours of mandated sport a week designed, in part, to tackle obesity. Bureaucrats should be careful not to overdo this wheeze. After all, secondary schools still have to cope with teaching maths and English to pupils who didn’t manage to pick up those basic skills during their …err… compulsory numeracy and literacy hours at primary school!
Parental Prohibition
Posted by Pete Quentin in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 04/01/2008
To tackle the increasing danger of ‘over-hydrated’ parents, those with children are being subjected to a harsh rationing of 2 drinks per visit. Perhaps Wetherspoon’s (famous for cut price alcohol and meal deals) is set to become a guiding light in the battle against binge-drinking, by advocating a sensible approach to responsible parenting?
Wetherspoon’s have asserted “what we don’t want is the adult just staying and drinking in the pub while the child is just sitting there”. Ah, so we are also concerned for the mental stimulation of our future generations – “We don’t want children there bored while adults drink.”
However, reading between the lines suggests Wetherspoons’ motive might be less admirable, writes Claire Daley.
Don’t force children to play the Government’s war-games
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 31/10/2007
More powers, new targets, less tolerance for failure, a boost to several central government run schemes (Teach First and Teach Next), are the only discernible content of Brown’s latest speech on education. The tone of the speech makes it sound as if the government, having annexed and occupied the education system decades ago, still finds itself combating a never-ending insurgency of ‘failure’. These forces of failure cannot be tolerated and must be eradicated.
Question 1: complete this cheque to pay the interest on your credit card
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 12/07/2007
It will take some time to unpick the latest additions and subtractions of the National Curriculum. But the main theme this round seems to be lowering children’s horizons. More compulsory elements of the History Curriculum have been axed, reduced down to essentials like the Glorious Revolution in order to tie into the requirement for pupils to understand the relationship between the Monarchy and Parliament. These reductions have been smuggled in under the guise of greater ‘flexibility’. If this were true, it would be admirable: allow teachers and schools to use their professional expertise to design a course that they think works for each class.
But there won’t be much opportunity for this while the school has to teach pupils how to open a bank account or how to calculate the size of their ‘carbon footprint’. If you want a vision of our children’s future, imagine trips to the Roman ruins at Cirencester cancelled so that the whole class can be shown the wonders of the local bank. Or instead of a trip to a local university to see the latest super-computer or MRI scanner in action, the local dump to spot how much rubbish their parents are failing to recycle!
See our report, The Corruption of the Curriculum (previewable on Amazon) to understand how we got here.