FE News
Category: FE
WMD and Education Research
Recent headlines have highlighted how education research findings must be treated with a little suspicion.
Contrast the findings of the government-funded UK Commission for Employment and Skills (Ukces) review into further and higher education, which calls for yet more league tables – this time in FE – with the Cambridge Primary Review that calls for formal [...]
Does Facebook reduce ’student drop-outs’ ...
The BBC today report that Facebook ‘cuts student drop-outs’. But does it? Is there any evidence for this claim?
No and we’ll show you why. Firstly, this article isn’t really about the this claim at all as only 2 passages out of 18 in the article refer to it:
1.
“”There has been a significant improvement in [...]
IfL, or else!?
Seems even the unions are in on the IfL scam. They are advising members to join asap when they know that staff in Adult Ed are being press-ganged into joining or threatened with the sack if they don’t.
Aren’t they supposed to have the interests of their members to look after?
plus ça change
A quick trawl of the web offers these timely reminders:
Further education lecturer, Barnet
Diana Whelham
Salary: £26,780
* Leo Benedictus
* Society Guardian,
* Thursday March 20 2003
* Article history
About this article
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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday March 20 2003. It [...]
Institute for Learning (or Leaving?!) Pt. 2
Apparently, the IfL fiasco is going from bad to worse. Firstly, FE teaching staff are being served with ultimatums – ’sign-up or lose your job’. Once signed up, however, full-time lecturers with decades of experience but without the necessary hoops, or those with overseas qualifications, are being told in droves that they are no longer [...]
Chris Thomson, are you from a different universe?
In ‘A chance to help shape our own future. Let’s grasp it’ Chris Thomson, governor of an FE college in Brighton, writes that the FE sector is no longer second-best but central to Government plans and we should be congratulating them. ARE YOU FOR REAL? Have you spoken to ANY teaching staff recently?
Another example of [...]
A Good Teacher
Great response to a BBC News article about what makes a good teacher.
The following response is indicative of the rest:
“I would have thought that it was quite obvious what makes a good teacher in this day and age. The ability to cope with enormous amounts of administrative paper-work including individual lesson plans for every lesson [...]
Institute for Learning (or Leaving?!)
EducationState doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about Ed Balls-Up’s new money-wasting, bureaucratic-ridden, job-for-the-boys initiative described below:
“Over 2,000 teachers and trainers have registered as members of the Institute for Learning (IfL) since its new website and online registration facility went live on Saturday 1 September 2007, increasing the professional body’s membership to nearly 5,000.
In [...]
College Strife
It has been brought to our attention that following the lead of Harlow College, Barnet College in North London are also hoping to get one over their employees.
It appears that relationships between senior managers and those lower down the managerial food chain have reached an all-time low. In “College staff ‘bullied’ into new contracts” it [...]
The Unimportance of Being a Paper-Based Writer
We at EducationState have started the new academic year with all the enthusiasm of the last but still face one wrongly-held belief after another.
Take Literacy. Why can’t the powers that be understand that in today’s economy higher-level paper-based skills are not as crucial in the world of work as keyboard-based ones? Clearly, a well-structured essay [...]