Read Melissa’s latest post on the Public Finance blog on the implications of the cuts for women and families. Continue Reading
Category Archives: Writings
New Schools Leg Up
An interesting blog here from The Other Taxpayers’ Alliance following Freedom of Information requests to government about the New Schools Network and its funding from government – with a positive endorsement of our new organisation the Local Schools Network right at the end. Continue Reading
The Local Schools Network
The Local Schools Network is now officially up and running – so please would you all click onto the site to indicate your support for your local school, if you wish to, and add a comment/story/view or two. A group of us set up this website/campaign after the government decided to fund the New Schools… Continue Reading
The L Shaped Room
In this week’s New Statesman, Melissa Benn returns to consider Lynne Reid Bank’s classic novel, The L Shaped Room, fifty years after it was first published. Continue Reading
…and this…..
Excellent piece by Simon Jenkins this morning on the many many wrong turnings of governments and politicians on education, localism, fairness etc over the years. There is now a real opportunity for the new Labour leader, if he or she is brave enough, to suggest something quite radical and rational on the schools front. It… Continue Reading
……….and this………….
And another excellent piece on unchristian practices in successful faith schools……. Continue Reading
I wish I’d said that ( 2)
Great piece in today’s Guardian about exactly what’s wrong with the government’s education agenda. It is in fact part of a speech by Huntingdon headmaster Peter Downes, in favour of his anti free school motion that was carried overwhelmingly at yesterday’s Lib Dem conference. The argument is put with utter lucidity; hence its inclusion in… Continue Reading
Thought for the day
On a recent discussion on pensions and retirement, Newsnight chose, rather ingeniously, to flag up the age of every speaker in brackets after their name. A joke? A way of putting content in context? Both, perhaps. It certainly made me think, if I am ever involved in an education discussion on that same programme, I… Continue Reading
The trouble they’ve (not yet) seen
Read Melissa Benn’s latest piece in Public Finance magazine on the looming protests against Coalition policies. Continue Reading
Selling off the schools system
Michael Gove says his education policies will help Britain’s poorest pupils, but will they just compound the social divide? Read Melissa Benn’s latest feature in this week’s New Statesman. Continue Reading
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War PETER MANDLER, 2020 Oxford: Oxford University Press 361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145 Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense… Continue reading…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’ Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival. More information here. Continue reading…
