Chris Kidd – applied youth ministry

Recent headlines from the world of education and schools work:

• Teachers threaten Sats boycott: Teachers are pressing ahead with a proposed boycott of Sats tests for 11yearolds.
• Parents urged to increase schools contact: Parents are taking a back seat in their child’s education, with almost two thirds saying they have little contact with their youngster’s teacher.
• Parents lose right over sex education: Sex education will be compulsory in all schools it was announced.  Thousands of parents lose the right to opt their children out of the lessons.
• Tories to raise entry requirements for teachers: A Conservative Government would make it harder to become a teacher by raising entry requirements for the profession, the party’s education spokesman Michael Gove declared.
• A child’s eye view of the Kingsmead estate: Children from a deprived London housing estate were given cameras to record the detail of their daily lives – with beautiful results
• Behaviour report for every child in school shakeup: Schools will be forced to provide annual reports about children’s behaviour for the first time under Government plans.
• Dyslexics find it hard to filter out background noises: Dyslexics find it hard to concentrate on reading and listening because they are missing an inbuilt “background noise filter” usually found in the brain a study finds.
• Churchill’s speeches fail exam: Texts written by masters of the English language including Winston Churchill Ernest Hemingway and William Golding would have been deemed below average under a new computerised exam system.
• Half of 14-year-olds have been bullied: Nearly half of England’s 14-year-olds have been a victim of bullying, research has found.
• Social networking sites criticised for failing to protect children: Facebook and MySpace condemned for not installing tool for reporting abuse
• Poor white boys are ‘worst performers’ at 11: Working class white boys are officially the worst-performing group in English primary schools, official figures show.
• One in 10 teenagers classed as ‘Neet’: 261,000 had no job or training place, despite 11 years of education.
• Ed Balls tells schools to make £750m savings: Ed Balls ordered schools to tighten their belts, setting out measures to save £750m a year by turning the lights off, cutting back on heating bills and sharing cleaners.
• Faith schools ‘better at tackling extremism’: Faith schools are better at tackling extremism and promoting race relations than ordinary comprehensives, research suggests.