A conversation I had with a friend ensued after they congratulated me after my first article in North East Bylines. This friend mentioned that their accommodation provider had refused to provide any financial support. An idea came after this conversation. Let’s see if any student who has studied in the North East this year actually benefitted from the rent strikes?
There is a real passion for the community and the region which permeates everything Mayor Driscoll says. It is clear that he sees the enfranchisement of the local communities and local businesses as the key aspect of his plans for the region.
It’s pretty clear: the Higher Education sector is at a crossroads. At the end of both options is a complex intersection, with academic enrichment, student pastoral support, the financial implications of the pandemic and public perception all being controlled by a single traffic light
I shout at the radio when someone says “north of Hadrian’s Wall” meaning Scotland, without knowing it goes along Shields Road; and associate themselves with the “civilised” invader, not the resisting Briton. I grimace when people think that we are Vikings “because we are north”; think we need their elocutionary education when we had electric light, proper mass transport, posh shops and high wages first. I end up swearing under my breath….
People that were once told that they couldn’t work from home due to IT systems not accommodating them were able to once the pandemic hit. This is quite possibly ableism in it’s purest form. Adaptations that ‘couldn’t’ be made prior to the pandemic suddenly could be made when it protected and supported able-bodied neurotypicals. It should not have taken a virus to make these accommodations. In this way Covid-19 has become a twisted equaliser of sorts.
Jim Walker looks back at his life from his time at boarding school to national service, working in Russia and Africa to teaching in Northumberland. A fascinating read!
If freeports were such a good solution, why we have not tried them before? Sadly, the answer is that we tried them before, but they did not work.
I am going to write about what I know and what I’m passionate about. I’m primarily focusing on education, but also disability rights, queer rights and mental health. Disabled and neurodiverse people including myself are ignored by the government, and especially by our region, and so I’m excited to shine a light on those issues.
To do the maths, each university should have received approximately £47,169. That isn’t bad, but students had to compete to get some of that and considering how many students relied on part-time jobs before lockdown, there must have been a lot of applications. The effort made by the government to be lazy was very frustrating; why provide direct support to all students when you can let universities play judge, jury and executioner?
I describe myself as a retired teacher. But I’ve also done work as actor; book-keeper; building labourer; ice-cream seller; interpreter; long-distance bus-driver; newsreader; paint salesman; pharmaceutical rep; proof-reader; property manager; and ski rep.
In September 1972, I took up two posts at Northumberland College of Education just outside Ponteland: one was as lecturer in English; the other was as a resident warden and Senior Resident Warden as from January 1973. The college had been a children’s home. When the site opened as a college in 1965, the cottages […]
In 1970, I returned to Britain from my teaching post at the University of Dar es Salaam and got a fixed-term job in the Overseas Education Study Group (OESG) in the Institute of Education at the University of Leeds. Our students were teachers whose governments had sent them to us to undertake advanced courses in […]
“The waterside responders scheme as highlighted in the video demonstrates a real life example of this and Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service like all other Services, as well as partners are committed to this. The swift and effective actions of the staff in the video in helping to rescue a person in a river at night and in trouble is a clear example of the lifesaving role that bar staff and others can make to saving lives with a little bit of training and equipment.
Jessie described her manifesto as a “manifesto of hope”. Her message is to those who are left-behind, who feel neglected and who need something better.
James Sheerin is keen to bring some fresh air to politics in more ways than one. He wants a real change for the better for his local area and he wants to see this through a pro-European, pro-environmental agenda which will benefit all of us and especially our young people.
VOTING is the most basic form of political participation in a representative democracy like the UK. Yet, voter-turn out has declined sharply since the 1950s – about 80% in the 1951 general election, but fell to 66% in the last election. In the Newcastle Central constituency only 56% of those registered to vote did so. […]
For individual young people, there are significant multiple ‘scaring’ effects associated with spending very long periods of time outside education and work. These include a loss of confidence and self-esteem; greater vulnerability to various limiting illnesses, including mental health problems; increased propensity to crime, and excessive use of drugs.
MWFC partnership Middlesbrough Women Football Club has teamed up with Teesside University to help support players from grassroots towards future footballing careers. The University currently runs a Football Association Girl’s Regional Talent Club (RTC), which helps to identify talented young players, while the University’s women’s football team currently competes in the second tier of the British […]
Youth have been hit hard by the pandemic with hospitality and retail suffering more than any other sector in the lockdown, their traditional first steps into employment. And Jessie is eager to help them make up lost ground once the economy starts to reopen.
Jim Walker in Red Square 1957 My brother John was at Trinity College, Cambridge so it was assumed that, after my national service, I would follow him there or go to Oxford. My mother, who was the parent who decided such matters, of course thought that she knew about Cambridge but wanted to find out […]
Only 7% of the age cohort attend private schools. But 65% of Johnson’s cabinet, 65% of senior judges, 59% of civil service permanent secretaries, 57% of peers, 52% of diplomats and 51% of journalists were privately educated.
From 1945 until 1957 we spent our summer holidays in Wales. At first, my parents hired a cottage called Gaerwen a few miles south of Cardigan and later another cottage, called Gwtws, just south of Fishguard.
Both the CBI and TUC have long argued that the North of England has fallen behind other parts of the UK and other countries in the level of ‘intermediate’ skills held by the labour force. The Durham university educationalist Frank Coffield and others continue to see the German system of technical education and apprenticeships as the way forward.
Teesside University offers free digital skills courses
Let’s provide space in the national curriculum in the form of citizenship lessons for learning about democracy, democratic processes, rights, responsibilities and justice, and developing all students’ skills sets. This alterative is based on education and intellectual enquiry, not just surveillance – important as this is. For liberal and representative democracy to be real, people need skills, knowledge, confidence and contacts. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, called politics the ”master science” – its purposes being the common good of humanity.
“The lack of social interaction is really difficult. The practical elements of my research were limited by the laboratory being closed, and I lost out on valuable research time. To adjust my work schedule was really challenging, and I have found the entire process stressful.”
The Good Law Project has also identified links between Computacenter, the company which has won contracts of at least £198m for the supply of these laptops and the Conservative Party. The founder of the company Sir Philip Hume and his wife have both made donations to the Conservative party with the latest being £100,000 for the 2019 General Election. Questions have also been raised on the price being paid for these basic laptops.
The divided communities followed different paths after the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA opted for politics and disarmed, bar a rump of dissidents in remoter areas. Their communities always valued education and new opportunities were readily seized on. Loyalists were less fortunate as competition for ‘their’ state jobs increased and the automatic right to follow fathers into the shipyards vanished.
Educationalists are divided as to the reason why young white working- class men are doing less well at every stage in the school system while young women are doing better than ever. The children’s Commissioner in Growing Up North puts it down to poverty and poor material circumstances in the home. There’ some evidence that teachers are not strict with boys. They are more likely to extend deadlines for written work, to have lower expectations of boys, and tend to be more tolerant of low level anti-social behaviour in the classroom.
As the psychologist Jussin (2017) notes girls’ low-take up of STEM-based and IT subjects has less to do with ability or discrimination than the fact that girls who excel at maths/science are as likely to be good at humanities based subjects. Young women she concludes are ”better all – rounders, but too few of those who are good at science choose it as their specialism post-16.”