Outside In

I have written extensively about Catholic education on this blog, and for those who have somewhere between little and no interest in the topic, I can only apologise that I am about to do the same again. Whilst I intend, in future, to write about what a specifically ‘Catholic’ education…

Question: why is there outrage whenever anybody suggests an idea or reform that will primarily benefit the highest achievers in our schools? It’s odd. Not least because whenever anybody suggests an idea or reform that will primarily benefit the lowest achievers in our school, there is nothing but rapturous applause…

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett Failing failing If one takes responsibility for an outcome away from the individual involved in performing an action, what happens? Or to frame this using an example, if one exhorts an individual to achieve a particular…

Joining in the latest round of Blame the Teacher! (©Gove&Wilshaw) comes Martin Stephen, kindly providing us with a case study of how to extrapolate monumentally ignorant conclusions from the gleaming spectacle of a sound analysis. His initial breakdown runs thus: bright children in state schools needs access to top quality…

As I have blogged previously, the Bishop of Lancaster recently set feral cats amongst flailing pigeons by questioning the role and status of Catholic schools, nominally within the Diocese of Lancaster. The questions were bold and challenging – partly, one suspects, they were instigated by financial concern (the Diocese not…

‘I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.’ Pope Benedict XVI…

I’ve often thought there is a tendency in teaching to try to offer intellectual justification for educational trends that lead primarily to diminishing the role of the teacher. Partly, I suspect, this is because of a philosophical and cultural fetish for anything that contravenes settled notions of authority and hierarchy;…

Teaching. It’s a tough job. Genuinely. Which means that, sometimes, people get into teaching and find it is not for them. The demands placed upon them, they decide, are too unreasonable. The task, they decide, too thankless. The alternatives, they imagine, too tempting. And so they leave the profession. This…