Society

One of the greatest dangers posed by the government’s curriculum review is that it will result in children abandoning more demanding subjects such as history, geography and languages at GCSE. This is the fear voiced by a number of educationists, including Baroness Spielman, the former chief of inspector at Ofsted, who said that scrapping the English Baccalaureate would be a ‘death blow to secondary languages teaching.’ Learning to read, write and speak a foreign language is not only a ‘skill’. It’s about learning how to think differently and think better This, alas, merely reflects a longer-term malaise: teaching the adults of tomorrow how to speak – and think – in

Our state counterterrorism strategy ‘Prevent’ is overwhelmed. This is the strand of our national plan, ‘Contest’, to defeat extremism. Prevent is charged with spotting and stopping tomorrow’s terrorists, but the official data on its operation over the last reporting year, released yesterday, paints a picture of mission creep and distraction and an organisation and that can’t do this job. Far from identifying people who want to kill for ideas, Prevent has become a repository for vulnerable and often dangerous young people who have been failed by every other state agency. Its net is cast so wide that very bad people have fallen through it and into atrocious crimes. There have

At times, I still hear my late father, Sean O’Callaghan’s, voice echoing in my mind. Sean died in 2017 but there’s no doubt what he’d make of Britain today: that the sepsis of sectarianism is slowly, but surely, poisoning our bloodstream. We’re entrenching extremes and sidelining moderates. Northern Ireland’s lesson is stark: entrench extremes, and moderation dies; let sectarianism fester, and democracy becomes zero-sum The ugly scenes outside Villa Park this week as pro-Palestinian and Israeli protesters faced off are a shameful reminder of how British politics is changing for the worse. Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance is gaining ground: from Corbyn’s Your Party, to pro-Gaza independents. Voters are prioritising religion

Bridget Phillipson and I have a lot in common. Like the Education Secretary, who started life in a council house in Tyne and Wear, I grew up on a tough estate. Mine was in Selston, a rural East Midlands mining village. Home life was hard; my mam was blind and illiterate. But against the odds – like Phillipson – I achieved outstanding results at my local state school. Decades on, I’m still proud that my grade As in physics, maths and English were O-Levels, not wishy-washy GCSEs. Labour’s mooted education review would almost certainly kick the ladder out from under kids like me Yet while our backgrounds are similar, I

When a maniac ran amok on a train near Huntingdon on Saturday, train steward Samir Zitouni put his life on the line. Zitouni bravely blocked the attacker from stabbing a girl, leaving him with a gash on his head and neck. The railway worker remains critically unwell in hospital. His family say they are ‘immensely proud of Sam and his courage’. They’re right to be: Zitouni saved numerous lives. Whether or not Zitouni is an immigrant isn’t clear – and nor does it matter But as Zitouni, who has worked for LNER for more than 20 years, recovers in hospital following the brutal attack, he is being used by some