Under Theresa May, the coalition government’s ambition to create more free schools was quietly dropped. Instead, there was an increasing focus on grammar schools. The former prime minister promised to pump £50 million into creating more places at these schools.

Grammar schools have the potential of launching students’ potential. Despite the UCL’s study published last year which suggests that any extra money should be shifted towards improving secondary education, they are an overwhelming success. In August, Stretford Grammar School achieved some outstanding results, with students achieving A*-B grades in their A-Levels. The UK is renowned for its variety of schools tailored to different pupils, and this country benefits from free choice when it comes to education. That is why Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is right to shift the government’s focus towards free schools and university technical colleges.

Free schools have been met with a mixed reception since their introduction in 2010, but considering it is a new system, there are bound to be some exceptions that betray the original intention behind this concept. The Independent reported on an analysis into government data carried out by the National Union of Teachers which estimated that approximately £138.5 million was wasted on opening 62 free schools, university technical colleges and studio schools that were subsequently closed, partially closed or failed to open at all.

Some critics claim that the schools take poorer pupils away from mainstream education and that there is no evidence they improve standards, despite the expenditure. The National Audit Office produced a report in February 2017 suggesting a place in a free school costs 51 per cent more than one in a secondary school.

Despite this, many free schools have been an overwhelming success. Spectator journalist Toby Young established his own free school called the West London Free School. He is also a former director of the New Schools Network. This year, 51 per cent of the West London Free School’s GCSE grades were at least a level 7 (the equivalent to the old A grade). According to their website, this is a significant improvement from their outstanding results last year. Like any other school, free schools work if they are led by teachers who are passionate about improving children’s lives.

Furthermore, the New Schools Network produced a study which revealed that 31 per cent of free schools have been rated outstanding by Ofsted, whereas the national average is 22 per cent. The controversial Michaela free school, renowned for its strict behavioural policy, was ranked among the best in the country for its GCSE results. More than half (54%) of all grades were level 7 or above.

Technical schools are also proving to be beneficial for many pupils. Although The Guardian reported that the Education Policy Institute argues that pupils at university technical colleges perform poorly, those who are more suited to a career in technical skills must be encouraged to pursue opportunities in this area.

The overwhelming evidence suggests that whilst technical colleges need to improve, they are also necessary. 43 per cent of vacancies in skilled trades were due to skills shortages in 2015. Last year, the Department of Education revealed that those who leave a technical school are more likely to enter an apprenticeship than those who do not.

For Britain’s education system to thrive, the government must invest in schools that will equip pupils with the skills they need to thrive. Labour’s policy in the 2000s of sending most students to university enabled the UK to experience a skills shortage. Every child is different and they should be provided with the chance to embrace their skill set. This is why the Education Secretary should continue to focus on alternative routes to education.

L'articolo Why Gavin Williamson Is Expanding Free Schools and Technical Education proviene da InsideOver.

The battle between generations is as old as time itself. Each generation blames the one before it and is suspect of the one after it. Right now, the generational battle being waged, real or imagined, is between baby boomers and millennials. Numbering 76 million and 73 million respectively, baby boomers are typically defined as those born between 1944-1964 and millennials, between 1980-1994.

The two Democratic presidential front-runners, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, both fall a little north of the baby boomer demographic. But both are best identified by it. While the other Democratic candidates run the spectrum from baby boomer to Generation X to millennials, only one of its candidates has the fervent support of millennials – the oldest candidate in the race, Bernie Sanders.

Assigning a group of people to an identity based on the year they were born is both arbitrary and narrow-minded. These labels can then be weaponized to fuel conflict when, in fact, none may be present. So, exactly how a 77-year-old man has managed to capture the almost undivided attention of millennials has been confounding pundits since he was the Democratic runner-up in 2016. But in digging a little deeper, it becomes much less perplexing.

Where the Democratic front-runner Joe Biden is currently succeeding with his promise to “restore the soul” of the country. Like a chiropractor doing an adjustment on your back, Biden desires to move the country back to where it was. Like a chiropractor, it may make you feel better but it won’t correct the problem.

If Biden is a chiropractor, Sanders is a surgeon.

Where Bernie Sanders is succeeding, as he did in 2016, is by acknowledging that America wasn’t that great before and that real change is needed. Sanders is the only Democratic candidate who has built his idea of change to be in tune with young people. Sanders has a clear picture of who the next generation of Democrats will be, and it’s not baby boomers or Generation X.

Over the past thirty years, wealthy Americans have added to their wealth. However, those Americans not as fortunate, by birth or luck, have slipped into “negative wealth.” Meaning that the value of their debts exceeds the value of their wealth.

An appeal of Sanders is his zeal in going after the top 1% of wealthy Americans. As he has pointed out in his stump speech, it’s three people who own as much wealth as the bottom half of Americans. To define that as anything other than inequality is to not understand the definition of the word.

Inequality is a priority for many Sanders supporters. And while millennials are witnessing and feeling the most inequality, it’s not their only concern. It’s a trio of other issues that have their primary attention, universal health care, student loan debt, and climate change.

It’s no secret that healthcare for the average person in America is abominable, at best. According to eHealthinsurance, coverage for an individual can run around 325 dollars a month, with an average annual deductible of about $4,400. At its worst, health insurance is non-existent.

Not having health insurance is terrifying for anyone, let alone someone who graduates college with 32 thousand dollars in student loan debt (the average amount of debt for graduates in 2019). With the average student loan repayment being around 400 dollars a month, a young person just beginning their life can be left to make a daunting decision.

As most student loans begin repayment after six-months, a young person just starting out can be left deciding whether to pay the loan or pay for insurance. Ignoring either is far from ideal, but only one can turn around and wreak havoc on your financial future if you ignore it.

The student loan market was small before 2000, just about 200 million dollars. By 2018, it had ballooned to 1.4 trillion dollars. A large part of Bernie Sanders’ appeal to younger voters is that he recognizes that having to decide between paying for health insurance and re-paying a student loan is absurd. Asking someone to make that choice is setting them up for a lifetime of failure.

Bernie Sanders is also a firm believer in the climate crisis, as are most millennials. In fact, in a recent tweet, Sanders referred to President Trump as an “idiot” for believing that climate change is a hoax. Like Sanders, many millennials believe that climate change is anything but a hoax. In fact, they believe that the wealth of previous generations was accumulated at the cost of the environment. A Pew poll recently revealed that 65% of millennials believe that there is evidence for human-caused climate change, compared to 47% of boomers.

Millennials, like Sanders, recognize that time is not on his generation’s side to ameliorate the climate crisis. It’s on them. In fact, that’s one of the things that Bernie Sanders has been exceptional at, recognizing that the change comes from the bottom up.

Sanders consistency in his political beliefs is both a criticism and a strength. It’s also unparalleled. His critics will say that he’s been saying the same thing for years. It’s a fair criticism, because he has been.

It can best be said that his career in politics is centered around democratic socialism. Now, the word “socialism” breeds fear in America. But it’s important to distinguish what Sanders means by “democratic socialism.” While he does call for reform on Wall Street, his belief has more to do with tax-funded social benefits rather than social ownership of production.

To deny Sanders’ career-spanning political commitment to forming a system that helps all and its appeal to a generation that has seen their government become co-opted by capitalism and politicians repeatedly shifting beliefs, like a Harry Potter character shifts shapes, would be naive.

Sanders recognizes that millennials have profound fear about sky-rocketing health care costs and the feeling that they owe fealty to the banks and financial institutions, as a result of their student loans. Accordingly, Sanders wants to break those shackles by providing substantial student loan forgiveness and providing universal health care. And as a firm believer in the science, and reality, of climate change, these issues aren’t political points for Bernie Sanders. For him, these are critical to the future of America.

The reason that much is made of this baby boomer versus millennial tension is that in a US-type of democracy, the number of people in a group is a big part of its electoral power. But only if they vote. The uphill struggle that Sanders faces is not in getting millennials to believe in him, it’s getting them to vote.

Cynics will say that millennials are only looking for free handouts and won’t show up to vote. The former is just cynical scrum and the latter was true in 2016. Only half of the eligible millennials voted in 2016, compared to ⅔ of the older demographic. However, in 2016, it could be argued millennials didn’t vote because their candidate, Sanders, was sidelined by the Democratic party.

However, that changed in the mid-term elections of 2018, as millennials nearly doubled their voting from 22% to 42%.

Having a candidate stand up for ideas that they believe in and are committed to is a recent development in American politics. Having grown up in an era of war, corporate malfeasance, the rising cost of education and healthcare, it’s no surprise that Sanders appeals to younger voters.

Bernie Sanders’ appeal transcends generations. His unwavering commitment to make the necessary changes for the future, both individually and systemically, is what pulls younger voters into his orbit.

L'articolo Why Bernie Sanders Appeals to Millennials proviene da InsideOver.

Being a teacher has never been easy, and in many parts of the world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult. This would seem to be true in Malmö, Sweden, where the local education authority has just announced that it will ask the guardians of 30,000 primary school children to sign a contract, requiring them and their children alike to adopt a ‘positive attitude’ towards teachers. The main reason: reports of violent incidents against teachers and other pupils in Swedish schools has been on the rise, increasing by 121% between 2012 and 2018, according to the Swedish Work Environment Authority (SWEA).

However, while some right-wing accounts of the rise in violence in Sweden has pinned the blame on immigration and a failure to ‘integrate’ migrants predominantly from war-torn Syria, the truth of the matter is considerably more nuanced and complex. Because as similar rises in school violence in the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere attest, such factors as poverty, inequality and cuts in public spending play a more significant role.

Reported assaults against teachers have been rising in Sweden since at least 2011, several years before the country began witnessing significant immigration from Syria. And since 2011, there has been a steady increase in reports of school violence, rising from 393 in 2012 to 870 in 2018. But despite this equalling a growth rate of 121%, the number of foreign citizens living in Sweden rose by only 39.7% over the same period, from 667,232 in 2012 to 932,266 in 2018. Their share of the overall Swedish population increased by roughly 2%, from 7% to 9.1%. This undermines the notion of a direct, one-to-one correlation between migration and school violence.

There’s also something else which undermines the idea that migration is to blame for the rise in violent incidents: in 2012, the system for reporting violent incidents in schools was changed, with the Swedish government introducing a webpage through which reports could be quickly made online. And according to Kjell Blom, a researcher and statistician at the authority, this made it easier to report incidents, also because the webpage was used to report workplace injuries to the more familiar Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA). “I think the knowledge of the reporting to SSIA is well known in Sweden,” he tells InsideOver. “But this webpage made people more aware of the reporting to SWEA also.”

There is, then, no strong evidence that Sweden’s problem with violence against teachers is getting distinctly worse, despite increasing reports. On the one hand, this impression is reinforced by figures the SWEA also keeps on cases of teachers missing work due to violence or intimidation, which show 396 such cases in 2015 and only 336 in 2018. And when the picture is expanded internationally, it becomes apparent that factors such as deprivation, inequality and public spending cuts are more pivotal in creating the conditions for violence than an influx of immigrants.

In the UK – where spending on education has been cut by around £7 billion in real terms since 2011 – violence against teachers has also been mounting: 1,400 pupils were excluded from school for physical or verbal assaults against adults in the 2016/17 academic year, as opposed to 1,330 in 2015/16. And as the Department for Education’s data made clear, children eligible for free school meals were four times more likely to be excluded than children who weren’t eligible.

Something similar is observable in the US, where a 2017 study by researchers at the University of Missouri found that teachers in schools with higher levels of student poverty were more likely to report being attacked or threatened, while they were less likely to be victimized if their school had more “supportive administrators and teachers.” Meanwhile, in Australia, the figures also reveal an increase in reports of violence against teachers, with teaching staff and their unions highlighting spending cuts as one of the chief culprits. “We’ve seen behaviour management programs cut, and fewer staff in schools who are available to engage with at-risk students before their behaviour escalates into violence,” said State School Teachers’ Union president Pat Byrne in 2016.

Even in Sweden, deprivation and insufficient support is likely the single biggest determinant of violence in schools. A study published in 2017 revealed that the performance gap between foreign-born students and Swedish students all-but disappears when socioeconomic background and neighbourhood was taken into account. This almost certainly applies to any ‘violence gap’ as well, because as headteacher Jan Jönsson told The Local in 2017, school violence in Sweden is generally concentrated in poorer areas, such as the Norsborg area where his school is based.

It’s encouraging to note that the performance of Karsby International School, which Jönsson has headed for over five years, improved after the introduction of student welfare initiatives and also a Mentors in Violence Prevention program. In other words, if rates of violence in schools are associated with immigrants, it’s only because such immigrants suffer from a variety of avoidable social ills and an absence of help, rather than from some ‘inherent’ inability to acclimatise themselves to new cultures.

L'articolo Sweden’s School Violence Problem is Part of an International Trend proviene da InsideOver.

L'articolo Education in Syria proviene da InsideOver.

Beit Jala, West Bank –We are at gate leading to Bethlehem, and in this village of fifteen thousand inhabitants, rich with centuries-old olive trees and dry stone walls that depict a landscape not dissimilar to the Puglian hinterland of southern-Italy, there sits the oldest catholic school in Palestine: the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. These scholastic institutions make up part of the Patriarchate which comprises 44 schools in total: 13 in Palestine, of which 6 are located in Gaza, 6 in Israel and 25 in the West Bank, for around 20 thousand students in total. But not just for Christians. The one we visited Beit Jala, in the heart of the this Sacred Land, was founded in 1854.

“Here there are 900 students divided into 31 classes, from 4 to 18 years. At first the majority were Christians. Now we have many classes where Muslims are the majority,” says Suhail T. Daibes, the head teacher for the Patriarchate School of Beit Jala. “It isn’t just because the number of Christians in Palestine is in constant decline. It is also because many Muslim families choose for their children to study here, rather than send them to government schools.”

Another teacher, Suhail is convinced of this fact: only education can stop the disappearance of Christianity. Christian Palestinians are generally more wealthy than Muslims and have a lifestyle more similar to those in the West. “Because of this the majority choose to emigrate. Christians are more individualistic. We suffer greatly from limitations to our freedom, with the ground around us seeming less every day, with Palestine becoming more and more like an open-air prison. You must understand also that with the barrier it is difficult even to go and pray freely at our sacred sites in Jerusalem. Because of all this, it is simply easier to just leave. I, in contrast, am certain that I must remain. To resist. This school is the only thing that permits me to do so, because it teaches you to persist in the struggle to find a path of dialogue, and not one of fundamentalism and closed-mindedness, which would serve to purpose.”

For this reason, it has always been the Schools of the Patriarchate that have been open even to Muslims and Druzes. Today we have schools, like Nablus for example where out of 615 students only 71 are Christians. “The  Christian children don’t have to attend school only with other Christians. They must study as part of a mix, which is representative of outside society. Otherwise, when they graduate from this school, they will confronted by a different reality, it will trigger in them the desire to emigrate, or perhaps to embrace some sect of fundamentalism,” implores the teacher.

However, if we also have government schools, and those run by UNRWA, the UN agency for refugees in Palestine, why would a Palestinian family choose to send their children to a Christian school? “It is because of the quality of education that they receive here. It is very strict, but at the same time allows for the children to play and have fun. Here you will rarely see problems between the Christians and Muslims, because from a young age they are taught constantly to respect the beliefs and traditions of everyone.”

The right to be respected, however, according to Suhail, is to have a clear identity. “If my identity is strong, if I do not waiver in my identity, they will feel encouraged to respect my rules, from the moment they enter my space. In response, I will try to do the same for them.” To make it easier for us to understand, the teacher, who is very familiar with Italy, gave us an example we could understand: “I heard that there is an ongoing debate on whether or not to keep crucifixes in classrooms. I find this absurd. You are a secular country, but still you have a tradition of Christianity, and must fight to defend it. Otherwise, you risk losing your history. Take my school for example. Here we have at least half of the students being Muslim. Still, everyone came to class today. Do you know why? Because we celebrate Christmas. No Muslims are subject to being left out because it is not a festival of their faith. The Christmas spirit here involves everyone, Christian and Muslim children alike, to whom we have taught to exchange gifts among themselves. What is important however is not just to give, but to receive. Everyone participates in singing Christmas carols, even their Muslim parents. Together with their children, and together with us. We do not have to change just because they are the majority. They have knocked at my door, and I have welcomed them in: my school is honoured to accommodate all of them. However they can’t dictate the laws under my own roof. They can’t do it even here, where Christians has come to represent only 1% of the Palestinian population. Remember your history, because you should not give up on your beliefs and traditions in Europe.

L'articolo The Cohabitation of Christians and Muslims Living in Palestine proviene da InsideOver.