education
hilary.whitney
David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and directed by Alan Clarke, that first brought Leland widespread acclaim and the story of Trevor, a sociopathic skinhead, indisputedly destined for a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What is it with Hollywood and education? Hot on the heels (shamelessly come-hither pumps, in fact) of Cameron Diaz in the lamentable Bad Teacher, we now get Julia Roberts as a disaffected babe who, we're told, is a teacher even though she spends precious little time in actor-director Tom Hanks's new film doing anything of the sort. Still, at least Roberts's unquenchable radiance lends Larry Crowne some measure of class; otherwise, here's another movie that merits detention for failing to make more than a passing detour in the direction of real life.You might be forgiven briefly at the outset Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The adult craving for education isn't a well that film-makers visit often. Educating Rita gave Willy Russell his finest cinematic hour. Say what you like about Kate Winslet’s concentration camp guard in The Reader, but such was her love of a good book at least she learned to read. The First Grader, set in the dusty Kenyan outback, revisits the subject, but there all similarities stop. It tells the true story of a one-time freedom fighter who in 2003 arrived at his local school demanding to take up the government’s offer of free primary education. Unlike most new students, Kimani N'gan'ga Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Cambridge University, cradle of Newton, Keynes and Wittgenstein, of Wordsworth, Turing and Tennyson, has produced 15 prime ministers and more Nobel Prize-winners than most nations. In its 200-year history, the university’s debating society has hosted princes, politicians and leaders in every field: the Dalai Lama, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, and last week a 25-year-old east-London DJ, Kissy Sell Out. But lest pacemakers should stutter or tweed be set atremble at the presence of mixing decks and a speaker in baseball cap and wife-beater, the Union also invited Stephen Fry along – Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Private music patrons aim to raise £2 million to fund 400 scholarships for London children with a talent for music. The aim is to give steady four-year support for disadvantaged children to have Saturday lessons, individual coaching and group tuition to learn a musical instrument. Alongside the scholarships, there is to be a "partnership" scheme whereby professional musicians go into schools to work on music with up to 10,000 schoolchildren.The 400 scholarships and the partnership scheme will be funded by a new music charity, The Mayor of London’s Fund for Young Musicians, set a fundraising Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Let us begin with the nots. Fashionably weird is not enough. Edgy, whatever that means, is not enough. The repeated use of the word “vagina” is not enough and semi-improvised ensemble acting is not, in itself, quite enough. These were just some of the many not-thoughts which ran through my mind during the opening episode of the much-touted Campus. So what did picky me want? I wanted funny.Created by Green Wing supremo Vicky Pile and written by six of the same team behind that fondly recalled surreal-com, it was difficult not to make comparisons between Green Wing and Campus simply because it Read more ...
fisun.guner
You might justifiably argue that Jamie Oliver’s lack of academic prowess (he left school with just two GCSEs – we’re not told what in) did him no harm whatsoever. Yet he’s keen that youngsters today should be switched on to education in a way that he clearly wasn’t. So he’s recruited 20 kids to take part in Dream School – kids who, like him, all failed to attain the requisite five GCSEs at grade C and above. And he’s recruited some pretty impressive names to teach them.Who wouldn’t put their hand up for an anatomy lesson with Robert Winston? Or to polish up their Shakespeare with Simon Read more ...
fisun.guner
Say what you like about the posh – they know their place. Equipped from an early age with a sense of entitlement, they also have access to the oldest and most powerful social network there is: call it what you will, but the old boys' network remains, and you’d be hopelessly naïve to think otherwise. Where would our current prime minister be without it? Tony Parsons, who, as a working-class boy made good, is among a pitifully declining breed, thought he knew: “If David Cameron had gone to a comprehensive school he’d be lucky to be digging ditches,” he spat. That seemed unduly harsh, but after Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The second play in this venue’s ambitious Schools mini-season is the first drama to tackle the currently contentious subject of Free Schools. While the earlier play, John Donnelly’s The Knowledge, was a powerful account of how a young teacher is blooded in her encounters with a group of unruly kids, the second, by Steve Waters, focuses more on parents, and shows how a fortysomething teacher, Rachel, joins a group of middle-class west Londoners in order to set up a Free School.Rachel is under stress. Martin, her ex, has a new lover, and so he wants to leave London and move into the countryside Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At a failing secondary school in Tilbury, Essex, Zoe arrives as an ambitious, newly qualified teacher who hopes to make a difference to her unruly pupils. But although she impresses her learning mentor, Maz, and Harry, the soon-to-retire acting head, she gradually gets into an emotional tangle. Neither her attractive manner, nor her will to succeed, nor her teaching skills are able to prevent her from making some bad mistakes: she wants to be friends with her pupils; she sleeps with Maz; she overplays her hand, in both classroom and staffroom.As the impeccably plotted story — which spans one Read more ...
graham.rickson
A glance at the programme hinted at the identity of the orchestra: you don’t perform Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and Janáček’s Sinfonietta in the same evening unless you’ve industrial quantities of brass and percussion to spare. This was riveting, transcendent stuff, and the most uplifting evening I’ve spent in a concert hall for years. Plus, the echoing barn of Leeds Town Hall is the ideal size for a 170-piece orchestra, a perfect place to experience Janáček’s hocketing brass fanfares. This was the closing concert of the NYO’s winter tour, and an incredible achievement for an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last year I took my musical instrument to Tower Hamlets. The heartland of the capital’s huge Bangladeshi community is not a part of London where you expect to hear much orchestral playing. Nor are boroughs like Hackney and Newham ordinarily seen as wellsprings of classical musicians. But they all have a dedicated music services department among whose tasks it is to stimulate instrumental learning.For the last four years the council’s music services department has been teaming up with teachers to get children to take up instruments. It has been a remarkable success. Already there are 7000 Read more ...