As someone who has spent nearly 40 years teaching Shakespeare in English classrooms (and an American one), I am mildly irritated by your report (All

Ministers have ruled out banning members of the British National party from the teaching profession, after an independent inquiry into racism in schools

A school district in Missouri has found a way to deal with the long-standing problem of its sink schools: close them down more or less overnight, explaining

Variations in blood pressure are better ways to predict the risk of stroke than high average readings and are also important indicators of vulnerability

Parents caught lying to the authorities to get their offspring into top state schools will have their child's place automatically withdrawn under new

The fast food chain McDonald's is to become the first UK employer to provide a GCSE-style qualification for work experience, in a move which it hopes

One in seven secondary schools inspected last term were branded inadequate under a new regime honing in on teaching quality and pupil progress, the

School lotteries can be destabilising for children and bad for their welfare, the schools secretary, Ed Balls, told MPs today.

Balls said he was

Eleven-year-olds are to learn Shakespeare using techniques employed by RSC actors, and English teachers will be encouraged to let pupils walk around

Last weekend, Keele University celebrated Neil Baldwin's 50th anniversary there. It was a splendid two-day affair, with speeches from distinguished

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk.

The Continuum school, Canvey Island, is an anonymous-looking place, tucked away down a side street on a gently decaying bit of the Essex coast. Inside,

When my children were small, I used to go to extraordinary lengths to arrange my work around the holidays so that I could be free when they were off

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk.

Damage limitationIn his responses to readers' questions, Michael Gove demonstrates why no teacher of sound mind would ever vote Tory (2 March).

He

I signed up to bury Twitter. Not to praise it. The idea was to complete a trilogy of columns I had entitled the "wind up a spod" series, and deliberately

The "climategate" scandal involving the University of East Anglia has sent shockwaves through universities, but many academics still do not fully appreciate

Socks over shoes surpass shoes over socks for strolling on slippery city slopes, says a study done in New Zealand. In other words – in the words of

As local authority budget cuts bite deep, the future looks increasingly uncertain for students training to become youth workers. Not only do they see

On a weekday morning in a Hertfordshire street, people are knocking on the door of an ordinary-looking house. Inside, a living room hosts a sofa, bookshelves,

In the last decade we have achieved a widespread recognition of the importance of higher education to the UK, unprecedented political backing – the

Last October, at Harvard University, I was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for public health for inventing the Emergency Bra, an item of lingerie that, in

Labour's target of getting 50% of young people to go to university has driven down standards and devalued degrees – and the next government should

Conference season kicked off at the weekend with John Dunford's swansong appearance at the Association of School and College Leaders. It's been a particularly

Private schools would be encouraged to turn into comprehensives under a Tory government, the shadow schools secretary, Michael Gove, announced today.

Parents have been finding out in the post today which secondary school their 10- or 11-year-old will be attending from September. One of them is Sarah

Combining world class education opportunities with the unique history, culture and the many public resorts, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts is the best way to spend a beneficial and amusing summer. 

He has been likened to Josiah Wedgewood, Henry Ford and Estée Lauder for what Fortune magazine calls his "intense drive, unflagging curiosity and keen

You may not recognise the names of all the world's most celebrated electrical engineers, but you'll certainly know about the inventions or projects

£20,627 Amount a newly qualified teacher earns a year (£25,000 in London)

£35,929 Amount an experienced teacher can earn a year on the upper

They say those who can, teach; or at least that's the catchphrase the government has long been using to entice graduates into the profession. But despite

"When people stop believing in God," GK Chesterton is widely believed to have said, "they don't believe in nothing – they believe in anything." In

The BNP's march into the mainstream moves forward. Fresh from their top-table seat on the BBC's Question Time (which marked International Women's Day

It goes without saying that schools should be places that promote tolerance and understanding, and that there is no room for racist views in such organisations.

So as a judge rules that the BNP's constitution remains discriminatory, does it matter if our schoolteachers sign up to a party that is intrinsically

Twenty-nine out of 61 Kansas City, Missouri, schools will soon be shuttered in a desperate bid by the struggling school district to stave off bankruptcy.

George Monbiot is surely right to bemoan the profoundly unsatisfactory state of affairs that exists between science and the public (With complex science,

So now Samantha Cameron is to be let off the leash – or maybe dragged unwillingly out of the kennel – to play her part in the election race. "You

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has a bad habit: when things appear to be moving in the right direction for him, he stumbles upon some

He was, wrote Thomas Macaulay, "the most eccentric, most artificial, most fastidious, most capricious of men", the culmination of what it was to be

A main board director of Tesco will today attack the quality of school-leavers and the standards achieved by A-level students and university graduates.

Lucy

The Japanese coastguard has arrested an activist from New Zealand for illegally boarding a whaling ship last month.

Peter Bethune, a member of

Courtesy to guardian.c

Public belief in climate science has seen a precipitous slide in the US, according to new polling that suggests fewer Americans are concerned about

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk.

More than two animals and plants a year are becoming extinct in England and hundreds more are severely threatened, a report published today reveals.

Natural

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk.

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk<

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk.

Dozens of skeletons, buried in Dorset with their skulls neatly stacked but their bodies tumbled chaotically into a pit, have been identified as the

It's been an endless source of aggravation between the sexes; how can men so easily forget birthdays, anniversaries, and even friends' names?

Not,

Today, many parents will be putting their children on to buses, cars or bikes and seeing them on their way to school. Sadly for the parents of 72 million

The trail starts in the 1990s, when relations between black communities and the authorities were a sorry tale and the Voice newspaper was at the forefront

Eliza Manningham-Buller's apparent lack of awareness of alleged US mistreatment of "war on terror" suspects is baffling (The ex-spy boss says she didn't

When people worry about the US economy being surpassed by the likes of India and China, it's often slipping educational standards that are identified

The school admission figures are out - and with them a guide to the squeeze on school places across the country. How many parents actually get their

Writerly ambition can take many forms. Martin Amis has taken on nuclear war, Stalin and the Nazis. Nabokov impersonated a paedophile. In Mathilda Savitch,

"Who in the world am I?" The universal question Alice asks during her journey through Wonderland is among the many disturbing and memorable lines from

Going in search of "Middle England" is as much a staple of Middle England as all those spurious examples – Marmite, hedgerows, the Spitfire – that

It's easy to sneer at Pauline Prescott, to take the mickey out of her fondness for such things as cutting the crusts off sandwiches, and plenty of people

Solar is a sly, sardonic novel about a dislikable English physicist and philanderer named Michael Beard. He's a recognisable Ian McEwan type, a one-dimensional,

Politician and man of letters Horace Walpole was a trendsetter. His house in Twickenham kick-started a revival in gothic architecture, and the publication

From calm seas, Lee Child has snuck up, virtually unseen, to batter our defences at every turn. A few years ago hardly anyone had heard of him. I picked

Courtesy to guardian.co.uk.

Five years ago, James Shapiro, an American academic teaching at Columbia university in New York took the international world of Shakespeare by storm

Michael Foot was a name I knew long before I was old enough to vote Labour. My dad's fading paperback copy of the first volume of Foot's biography of

Watching rows of 11-year-olds fidget on a drizzly winter morning at Claremont school in Harrow, north-west London, I wonder if the Royal Shakespeare

Increasing numbers of parents will defy government recommendations this autumn and take their children out of school to ensure an affordable - and sunny

Teenage mothers are being thrown on the career scrap heap because they face so many barriers in getting back into school, the children's charity Barnardo's

Google and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage have reached an agreement to digitise up to a million out-of-copyright works at the national libraries

Particle physicists aren't supposed to be like Professor Brian Cox. He's young and handsome, has a nice smile and fashionable hair, more like a pop

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood will reportedly return to film scoring, writing music for an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. The score will

The British National party (BNP) has accused local education authorities of taking no action against "leftwing teachers ... promoting their own politically

In mobile technology, it is often the developing world that leads the way – by using mobile phones to teach people a foreign language, for example.

In

He is already a byword for unremitting graft, with 21 novels, 13 historical studies and a couple of children's books to his name, as well as separate

As news organisations struggle to find new revenue models, education offerings seem to be a very good way to extend the brand and earn extra revenue.

I am just back in the office from delivering a course in Aberdeen. I still do some of the training from time to time to keep a feel for what people

On a hot Friday afternoon at Katine primary school, in north-east Uganda, Santa Awiyo points her large wooden ruler at the blackboard as her year-three

The secret at the heart of the short-lived, notoriously unconsummated marriage of John Ruskin, the great artist, architect, poet and political thinker