I’ve been a skeptic of much PISA based policy tourism for a while. Back in 2012 I highlighted “The curious case of PISA and suicide” whereby no country seemed to outperform England in PISA without also having a higher suicide rate. More recently I’ve been somewhat obsessed with John Jerrim’s work showing that Asian country’s PISA performance is not quite as …
“When… a military leader takes upon himself the responsibility for an attack… he choses to do it… no doubt he acts under higher command, but its orders, which are more general, require interpretation… action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities.” Sartre, ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ p.35. Of all the stock phrases used by politicians …
Recently I’ve heard several people argue that PISA has only become a talked about concept because of is used for political spinning. I desperately want to state that the quality of PISA is always in the spinning, but I’m not sure the pun is fully understood. So instead I shall move on to asking, what …
For 130 years the Chamberlen family kept a secret which, had it been shared, would have prevented decades of untimely deaths. In the late 1500s, Peter Chamberlen – a London-based French surgeon – developed the first tool for successfully extracting live infants otherwise obstructed during labour. Chamerberlen’s solution – the forcep – looked like a …
The Expert Review of the National Curriculum will influence what schools teach from 2013 onwards. The document runs to 58 pages so for brevity’s sake LKMCo provided a short guide to the key points. However, I only yesterday noticed we missed a crucial piece of information. Tucked away at the bottom of page 24 is …
