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IOE at 120: war and peace, 1912–1922
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 24 February 2022
24 February 2022
This blog is the second in a series of 12 exploring each decade in IOE’s history in the context of the education and society of the times. Find out more about our 120th anniversary celebrations on our website, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with everything that’s happening.
Following its foundation in 1902, the London Day Training College’s second decade was profoundly shaped by the First World War (1914-1918) and its aftermath. The numbers of students on the roll dropped sharply as men enrolled in the armed forces after the British government’s declaration of war with Germany in August 1914. Women students also left for war work, including in munitions factories or in clerical work in government departments. By the middle of the war in September 1916 there were just 211 students, nearly all of them women. The 16 men left were those deemed medically unfit for service.
With London schools facing severe staffing shortages, the LDTC’s student teachers stepped up to new responsibilities that included increased teaching practice, students assuming full control of classrooms, and women being placed in boys’ secondary schools for Read the rest of this entry »
In the balance: the artful mix that goes into becoming a Modern Foreign Language teacher
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 23 February 2022
JESHOOTS-com / Pixabay
23 February 2022
Many teacher educators are concerned that the Government’s Initial Teacher Training Market Review and its ITT Core Content Framework impose too many generic requirements, and leave insufficient time for each subject’s unique characteristics and methods. Teaching and learning a second language is a complex, messy business and, as the Ofsted Subject Review on languages recognises, ‘there is no single way of achieving high-quality language education.’
Languages teachers, therefore, need not only to have subject knowledge expertise in the languages and associated cultures they teach, but also in second language learning theories and pedagogy.
The PGCE Secondary languages programme at UCL does not promote any single teaching Read the rest of this entry »
Floating on the ‘cloud’ or living in the material world? Teaching online in the time of Covid
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 16 February 2022
16 February 2022
At the beginning of the pandemic, schools and universities were forced to ‘go online’ at short notice. We often refer to this as ‘virtual learning’, but is that really a good description? We think about the internet as something separate from the ‘real world’ we see in front of us, full of objects and people. The language used to describe it suggests this too – we talk about ‘the cloud’ and ‘the ether’, giving the idea that the online world is a special place, free from the messiness of the material world.
However, the reality of ‘online learning’ is also part of the that world. Computers, laptops and smartphones are objects, and we work with them in ‘real life’ settings. During the pandemic, millions of people had to set up and use digital devices at home for work or study. As we Read the rest of this entry »
Financial literacy part 3: Are there socio-economic differences in how parents interact with their children about money?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 11 February 2022
11 February 2022
By John Jerrim
In the previous blog in this series I investigated socio-economic differences in young people’s financial skills. This focused upon the types of financial questions that young people from advantaged backgrounds can successfully answer, that their peers from disadvantaged backgrounds can’t.
In this next blog, I start to consider socio-economic differences in one of the key inputs into the development of young people’s financial skills – the role of their parents. Are there certain things that higher-income parents do with their offspring to nurture their financial skills, that lower-income parents do not?
Lets take a look (with further details available in the academic paper here). Read the rest of this entry »
Financial literacy part 4: Do disadvantaged children receive enough financial education in school?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 11 February 2022
11 February 2022
By John Jerrim
In the third blog in this series I started to investigate socio-economic differences in the inputs into young people’s financial skills, focusing upon the role of parents.
Schools, of course, also have a key role in helping to develop children’s financial skills. Therefore, in this final blog of the series, we turn to socio-economic gaps in the provision of financial education within primary and secondary schools.
Big gaps in primary schools
Let’s start by looking at what happens in primary school. Figure 1 illustrates the percent of primary pupils who say they have been taught various financial skills at school, stratified by socio-economic background.
There are two striking results. Read the rest of this entry »
Financial Literacy part 1: How unequal are children’s skills?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 10 February 2022
10 February 2022
By John Jerrim
In an increasingly complex financial world, it is important that we ensure young people develop a sound knowledge of financial issues and possess key financial skills. This is particularly important for young people from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds who, unfortunately, are the most likely to struggle financially during adulthood and become entrapped in a cycle of poverty and debt.
Yet, in the UK, we know relatively little about children’s financial capabilities, including differences between socio-economic groups, and the age when such gaps start to develop.
Along with Jake Anders, and Lindsey Macmillan, I have tackled this issue in a new academic paper. This uses data from the 2019 Children and Young People’s Financial Capability Survey – based upon responses from 3,745 children from across the UK.
Spoiler alert! The gaps are pretty big, and emerge pretty early. Read the rest of this entry »
Financial literacy part 2: What can rich kids do that poor kids can’t?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 10 February 2022
10 February 2022
By John Jerrim
The first blog in this series illustrated how there are substantial socio-economic gaps in children’s financial literacy skills, with these differences emerging before the start of primary school.
But what exactly can rich kids do – in terms of their financial knowledge and skills – that poor kids can’t?
This blog takes a closer look. Read the rest of this entry »
Safer Internet Day 2022: 7 things for parents and teachers to think about
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 8 February 2022
8 February 2022
By Sandra Leaton Gray and Andy Phippen
- Don’t panic! Most of the time, most young people are using digital technology safely and for positive reasons. However, that is not the sort of headline that will sell newspapers and generate traffic to their websites and, moreover, it is not the sort of message that will generate many donations to NGOs and charities.
- Remember that being online is not the same as crossing the road, despite what you might be told. While we might talk about road safety as a concept, applying that to the online world is problematic. The road setting tends not to change too much, and crossing the road is a relatively straightforward operation that can be addressed with simple safety instructions. In contrast, there are always new aspects to the online world, new games, apps, platforms and devices. We have to bear that in mind when Read the rest of this entry »
How do we make sure the most disadvantaged children get a good education during public health emergencies?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 7 February 2022
7 February 2022
By Kendra Pyne, Yi Shi and Mukdarut Bangpan
School support to build children’s resilience and boost their analytical skills could help to mitigate the inequalities that have increased during the pandemic. This is one of the broad range of interventions highlighted by our analysis of 52 research projects from around the world published in the International Journal of Educational Research.
As schools shut their doors during the Covid-19 pandemic, educational systems around the world have been struggling to provide continuity of teaching and uphold the quality and inclusiveness of education. While school disruption has affected all communities in terms of livelihoods, learning and economic opportunities, and psychological health, people living in disadvantaged situations are more likely to suffer from the most detrimental consequences.
Such disparity has led to a series of unanswered questions in the context of public health emergencies: what action has been Read the rest of this entry »
Levelling up education and skills: a recipe for success?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 3 February 2022
Photo by vsuydam via Creative Commons
3 February 2022
By Claire Crawford, Laura Outhwaite, Sam Sims and Gill Wyness
It’s finally here: an answer to the question of what the government means by ‘levelling up’. On the education and skills front, it seems to involve some seriously ambitious targets: a massive increase in the percentage of children achieving the ‘expected’ level in reading, writing and maths at age 11 over the next eight years across all areas, with more than 50% rises needed to meet the target in most local authorities. Alongside these national targets, a set of 55 ‘Education Investment Areas’ – roughly the poorest performing third of local authorities in terms of primary and secondary school results – were identified, in which some new (and some re-announced) policies would be targeted.
It is good to have specific, measurable and stretching goals, but given the scale of ambition involved, there was very little detail of how we will actually get there – and no evidence of significant new resources to do it. Complex issues, like inequalities across the life course, require holistic solutions and joined up thinking across all aspects of the journey – things that simply cannot be delivered without appropriate funding. There was also little evidence of the embedding of new announcements within existing strategies – certainly in terms of the plans for educational technology, with the white paper championing the creation of a new online UK Read the rest of this entry »
