NEWS THE WEEK
www.theweek.co.uk
Britain’s leading current affairs digest rounds up the main education stories exclusively
for First Eleven magazine
nothing to worry about Sad children are
Carol Sarler,
The Independent on Sunday
Truancy high
School truancy has reached a record high, and increased by 44 per cent since Labour came to power. Around 10 million school days were missed without permission last year by around six million pupils.
The Guardian
Jamie Oliver campaign yields results
Good news for Jamie Oliver comes with the report that primary school test results in Greenwich improved after the TV chef banished Turkey Twizzlers from canteen menus. The number of “authorised absences” (generally due to illness) also fell by 15 per cent following Oliver’s 2004 Feed Me Better campaign.
Brain training put to the test
Brain-training games, such as Nintendo’s bestselling Brain Age, promise to exercise your brain and boost your brain power. But do they actually work? To test their efficacy, researchers at Cambridge, London and Manchester universities divided around 11,500 volunteers into three groups. Over the course of the next six weeks, the people in the first group regularly played brain- training games; the people in the second practised more general cognitive tests; and the rest researched
WWW.FIRSTELEVENMAGAZINE.CO.UK
questions using the internet. By the end of the six-week period, the people in the first two groups were better at the specific tasks they had been allocated, but none showed a significant improvement in standard tests of cognitive function. The researchers’ conclusion was that brain-training games make you better at brain-training games, but that’s about it. Or, as the lead researcher Adrian Owen put it to The Guardian, “You’re not going to get better at playing the trumpet by practising the violin.”
One in 10 children between the ages of 10 and 15 are unhappy. At least, that’s the conclusion of a recent survey carried out by the Children’s Society, says Carol Sarler. The charity’s boss described the finding as “a major concern” – but is it really? Given that the causes of unhappiness were worries such as schoolwork, feeling ugly or having “parents that won’t let you do stuff”, it’s amazing that the figure was only one in 10. Since when did teenage angst become a problem in need of an organized response? It’s bad enough that we already give Prozac to children as young as eight and dish out 500,000 prescriptions of Ritalin a year to children. No doubt there are some youths who could benefit from the family mediation and counseling promoted by the Children’s Society, but this rush to “pathologise” normal emotions is unhealthy. If your best friend has spurned you, or you’ve failed an exam, or the family pet has died, you’re supposed to feel sad. You don’t need treatment. The thing about “youthful blues” is that they pass – as children will learn for themselves if we let them.
✒
SUMMER 2010 FIRST ELEVEN 13
PHOTOS: DAVID LOFTUS/ISTOCKPHOTO, JOHN MATZICK
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84