List of The last word Archive

What is the 'London' in a London Curriculum?

Blog

21 Jun 2012

Yesterday's consultation event on a London Curriculum (which is one of the strands being undertaken by the Mayor's Inquiry into London Education) has thrown a number of conundrums in my path - despite having been living and breathing area based curriculum ideas for a number of years now!

Rochdale: abuse, misogyny and misrepresentation

Comment

20 Jun 2012

Anwar Akhtar FRSA, director of The Samosa, responds to the issues raised by the conviction of nine men as part of a child sexual exploitation gang targeting vulnerable girls in Rochdale.

You don't have to be mad to work here

Blog

20 Jun 2012

Matthew Taylor

As a panellist on Moral Maze tonight (Radio 4, 20.00) I will be discussing some of the implications of a recent LSE report on mental illness and treatment in the UK. I am looking forward to the programme, but with some trepidation, as I find myself ambivalent about both the report and the issue in general.

Latest Catalyst winners

Fellowship news

19 Jun 2012

The latest ideas supported by Catalyst will help: homeless people build beneficial social networks\\; build a low-cost matching service for job-seekers, recruiters and learners based on crowd-sourced data and\\; bring the Perspex museum donation box to the mobile phone.

33 years too late

Blog

19 Jun 2012

Matthew Taylor

In a talk to some up and coming councillors on Sunday I decided to try a new method of presentation. Influenced by the latest evidence about physical fitness, it was a kind of intellectual interval training. Over an hour and a quarter I delivered five packages of dense and quite challenging material, each about seven minutes long, interspersed with five minutes for table conversation and a couple of questions. For the record the sessions covered:

If we want to address poverty, let's begin by making work pay

Blog

18 Jun 2012

Benedict Dellot

Last week was abuzz with commentary over the latest poverty figures from 2010/11, Labour's last year in government. According to DWP’s own figures, relative child poverty had been halved from 3.4 million in 1998-99 to 1.4 million in 2010-11. Likewise, the number of pensioners in relative poverty is reported to have fallen by some 700,000 over the same period. Notwithstanding these notable improvements, everybody knew long in advance that Labour was never going to reach its ambitious target of halving child poverty by 2010. Thus, as soon as the figures were announced and this failure finally confirmed, commentators from all sides were ready to throw in their thoughts about why success never materialised.

RSA Fellows help learners plan their next steps

Blog

15 Jun 2012

Students leaving school today face a daunting set of challenges, not least a competitive job market and a crowded university admissions process. These circumstances put students under great pressure to make the right decisions, and a project funded by our Catalyst seed fund has tested a new approach to helping students think clearly and realistically about their options.

...Worth a thousand words

Blog

14 Jun 2012

A lamentable aspect of friendship involves watching movies.

Connectome

Video

14 Jun 2012

Dr. Sebastian Seung is professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology