Blog posts for ‘Careers’ 
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Why should girls' schools have to make their case? A riposte to Lord Lucas
Sunday 29 April 2012
Categories: Careers, Education, Media Influence
If you read today’s Times or Daily Telegraph, you will see headlines that suggest that girls’ schools are a dying breed: “Pull your socks up or you’ll die out, peer tells girls’ schools”; “Girls’ schools ‘going out of fashion’, expert warns” – although the print edition of The Times has the alternative title “Girls’ schools give chauvinist peer a lesson in single-sex education”. Read the articles themselves and you will realise that they contain the opinions – and...
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Why we have too few women leaders...
Monday 2 April 2012
Categories: Careers, Higher Education, Role Models
If you have 17 minutes to spare sometime, do watch this inspiring video of Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, talking about the position of women in the workplace, and think how we are preparing our daughters to face the personal and professional challenges they will meet in the future.
Sheryl bemoans the fact that there are insufficient numbers of women at the top in so many key professions and positions of responsibility. She suggests we need to change this...
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What price success?
Monday 20 February 2012
Categories: Careers, Education, Higher Education
In a recent issue of The Times Educational Supplement, maths teacher Jonny Griffiths recounted a conversation he had had with a highly achieving but anxious A level student who had approached him (again) for advice about his studies. Seeing how anxious the student was, and knowing how counter-productive that can be, Jonny encouraged the student to try not to worry so much about his grades, finally saying, ‘what is better: to go to Cambridge with three As and hate it or to go to Bangor...
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Get real... as if!
Friday 17 February 2012
The debate about whether a school is right to ban pupils’ use of slang (Daily Telegraph 14/2/2012 ) seems to me to be missing the point. I’ll get back to why the attempt to ban slang in school is not only futile but also misguided. Let’s start with what this school is trying to achieve.
Like all schools Sheffield Springs Academy wants to improve students’ job prospects – highly laudable, particularly in the current difficult economic situation. It believes students can improve...
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Follow your star...
Thursday 22 December 2011
Categories: Careers, Education, Role Models
Now girls have a role model who parents will heartily endorse – Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock – a female Professor Brian Cox. She may not have been in a rock band in a previous incarnation but she has triumphed over her dyslexia to become the lead scientist at a British space technology company. Dr Pocock now tours inner city schools urging pupils, and especially girls, to study science.
Appropriately in this festive season her message is one of hope. As Dr Pocock goes round schools breaking...
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'Women earn more than men': should we be excited?
Friday 7 October 2011
Categories: Careers, Role Models
A recent article in The Independent by Richard Garner, the Education Editor, drew attention to the content of this year’s Elizabeth Johnson Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Physics. Betty Johnson, who died in 2003, was a great supporter of women in the sciences, and in her honour, this lecture this year was given by Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. She spoke in part about figures published by the UK Office of National...
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Girls crack royal eggsperiment...
Wednesday 5 October 2011
Who said girls weren’t interested in science? Not only are they interested – and getting top marks in public exams – now they’re being consulted by ‘eggheads’ at the top of the scientific world.
It’s not every day that school pupils are commissioned to undertake an official scientific experiment. But that’s eggsactly what happened to the girls at Sherborne Girls’ School when the Royal Society of Chemistry asked them to discover what makes the perfect boiled egg and...
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Girls, science and glass ceilings?
Thursday 25 August 2011
Categories: Careers, Education, Role Models
A recent article in The Telegraph on ‘Science stereotypes’ claimed that “more girls are opting for science subjects, but stubborn prejudices persist”. It explained how women have been awarded only 16 out of the 540 Nobel Prizes in Science, and how only 10% of the membership of the Royal Society is female. Dame Athene Donald, professor of Physics at Cambridge University, said: ‘Too many young women are discouraged – actively or passively – from pursuing their dream of a...
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Trailblazing at the New College of the Humanities
Wednesday 8 June 2011
Categories: Careers, Education, Higher Education
When Anthony Grayling spoke to the senior students at St Paul’s recently, offering them an effortless, witty, note-free guided tour of the history of Western philosophy in slightly under 35 minutes, it was clear that here was someone supremely in command of his subject. The rapt attention of his audience also reflected his instinctive gift for the kind of communication that works for intelligent 17-year-olds, albeit of the hands-free, information-rich generation, afloat on a largely...
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Girls will be girls...?
Friday 15 April 2011
Categories: Careers, Education, Media Influence, Role Models
Ofsted has criticised mixed schools in particular for failing to encourage girls to think about entering careers other than the traditional ones. Guardian 12/4/11 These jobs, including beauty therapy, childcare and hairdressing, generally have lower pay scales and fewer opportunities for progression. However Ofsted said that girls in single sex schools, especially those in selective schools, had more positive attitudes to non stereotypical careers. In these schools girls didn’t view any...
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Categories
- Careers (13)
- Drugs and Alcohol (3)
- Education (62)
- Extra curricular (11)
- Family Relationships (21)
- Growing up (20)
- Health (13)
- Higher Education (6)
- Homework (6)
- Letting go (5)
- Literacy (1)
- Media Influence (33)
- Parenting (33)
- Personal Safety (10)
- Role Models (25)
- Self-esteem (9)
- Sexual Relationships (5)
- Technology & the Internet (7)
- Teenagers (17)