Interesting Facts

13th March The Dunblane school massacre took place. It is still one of the deadliest firearms incidents in UK history, when a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland on 13 March 1996, before killing himself. With the consent of Bob Dylan, the musician Ted Christopher wrote a new verse for the song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" in memory of the Dunblane school children and their teacher. 

Go shoeless According to a study by Bournemouth University schoolchildren who don't wear shoes in their lessons are likely to obtain better grades and behave better than those who do. (Experts believe that by leaving their shoes outside the classroom pupils feel more at home, and relaxed. An added bonus is that it cuts down on cleaning bills.  No more muddy floors, although holey socks might be an embarrasment.) Next session online, everyone must take their shoes off.

According to a story in the Daily Mail, primary school children in Dundee are having to sign a 17-clause contract before they can play football in the playground. (The 17 clauses are as follows:- I will not deliberate foul tackles I will not carry issues off the pitch to class or after school I will not argue an agreed out or an agreed foul I will not hog the ball  (They actually wrote hogg here.) I will not name call or tease I will not chant, use banter or wahoys! I will not gloat or boast I will not, if scorekeeping be a sore loser and will congratulate the other team I will not elbow or shoulder barge I will not deliberately chase on the pitch or swipe the ball from people I will not cheat I will keep up with my school work I will demonstrate sportsmanlike conduct and apologising I will use timeouts for myself as individual players if needed I will use supportive and encouraging language I will take turns in position I will ensure teams are fair and no swap...

New guidelines for school pupils in England state that only phrases starting with "what" or "how" merit an exclamation mark! (This means that children who use punctuation marks in written tests will be penalised unless they adhere to strict rules. I mean, I know I ask people not to use them in every sentence, and to stick to one, but really, this is way too prescriptive. Irk the purists!)

Homeschooling is legal in the UK, but there is no register for home-schooled children. To the best of my knowledge, the following countries have banned homeschooling:- Albania Andorra    Armenia Azerbaijan Belarus    Bosnia and Herzegovina Brazil Bulgaria    Croatia Cuba Cyprus El Salvador Georgia Germany Greece Greenland Guatemala Liechtenstein    Lithuania    Macedonia    Malta    Moldova    Montenegro    Netherlands    Serbia Sierra Leone Sweden Trinidad and Tobago Turkey

According to guidelines drawn up by, of all things, the Institute of Physics the following words and phrases should be avoided to prevent sexism. Sissy Don't be a girl Man up Cupcake (Senior teachers will be appointed ‘gender champions’, in a bid to eliminate gender stereotyping. I would suggest they add, "grow a pair" and "you throw like a girl" to that list. In all seriousness, the idea is that schools should find strategies to get more girls to study so-called ‘male’ subjects such as economics and physics at GCSE and A-level, while boys should be encouraged to take more ‘female’ subjects including English literature, foreign languages and psychology. Hang on! Male subjects and female subjects - now that is sexist. The Department for Education obviously has a lot of time on its hands, and a slightly worrying regard for physicists.)

According to the chief inspector of schools in the UK, Sir Michael Wilshaw, secondary school pupils should be forced to refer to their teachers as ' Miss' and 'Sir' and stand when the teacher enters the classroom. (Sir Michael told The Sunday Times that he had been left with his 'head in his hands' after watching reality television programmes set in schools in which children misbehaved without risk of punishment. According to the Times Educational Supplement , the honorific Sir was first used in 16th century classrooms when male teachers of a lower social standing were attempting to reinforce their authority among largely upper-class boys, whilst Miss is largely a throwback to the late Victorian era when pressure was put on women to give up work after they married, with a number of schools only hiring single female teachers. Jennifer Coates, emeritus professor of English language and linguistics at Roehampton University also pointed out, “Sir is a knight....

According to a study carried out by the British Heart Foundation, Brits spend about 19 minutes a day on regrets, which means we waste 2 hours a week dwelling on things we wish we had (or hadn't) done. (The average Brit seemingly has six major regrets.  The most frequent are not travelling enough and failing to keep in touch with friends.  Here are the top 20 regrets:- 1. Not travelling more and seeing more of the world 2. Not keeping in touch with more friends from the past 3. Taking too little exercise 4. Not saving enough money 5. Taking up smoking 6. Not working harder at school 7. Choice of career 8. Wasting years with the wrong partner 9. Eating unhealthily 10. Not asking grandparents more about their lives before they died 11. Not learning to speak a foreign language properly 12. Not spending enough time with family and friends 13. Not telling a relative who’s now dead that I loved them 14. Drinking too much alcohol 15. Not undertaking a once in a li...

According to research by the social mobility and child poverty commission, old-fashioned snobbery is alive and kicking in the UK. (Elite British companies are thwarting the career prospects of talented working-class applicants and recruiting applicants from public schools because of their accents and mannerisms. The commission examined recruitment at 13 elite law, accountancy and financial companies who between them appoint 45,000 of the top jobs in the country. It found that 70% of jobs offered by those firms in 2014 went to applicants from public or selective schools, even though such schools only educate around 11% of the population. I'm not in the least surprised, but it's their loss. If you are talented, but turned down for a job because you aren't "posh" enough, open your own company, and put them out of business in a few years.) !Note - A public school is a private school in the UK.  I went to a state school. Source

nder plans set out by Schools Minister Nick Gibb, every state school pupil will be expected to sit at least five “hard” GCSEs to increase the number of state-educated students at the best universities and in the top professions, the government has said. (This means that all pupils starting secondary school in autumn 2015 will be expected to take maths, English, a foreign language, history or geography and at least one science subject when they begin their GCSE courses in 2018. If you have just sat your art and design, music and drama, business studies, communication and culture and citizenship exams, you can breathe a sigh of relief.)

According to a poll carried out by Kelloggs, British children as young as 10 worry their SATS results will ruin their future. (The poll revealed that more than half of children surveyed were anxious about not achieving Level 4 in Maths, Science and English - the national standard, and 25% of parents said their child was too nervous to eat before the exams, with 14% saying they had refused to eat, whilst other kids say they take up smoking! SATS (Standard Assessment Tests) are given at the end of year 2, year 6 and year 9 in the UK, and are used to show a child's academic progress compared with other children born in the same month. They shouldn't be confused with the US SAT scores.)

Over the last 2 days, the Hanson Academy in Bradford, West Yorkshire, has sent 215 pupils home for not adhering to school uniform rules. (The school wants pupils to dress in a blazer, smart shoes, trousers, and shirt with a correctly-tied tie, they also need to wear an id badge on a lanyard around their necks (I wonder if they have risk assessed that). The infringements included - wearing hoop earrings, the wrong kind of trousers / jackets, no tie, no id, dyed hair... Please feel free to join any of our Virtual World English sessions and dress as you like, as long as you're dressed.)

According to a report by Ofsted, pupils in England are losing an hour a day's teaching because of bad behaviour in class. (Ofsted inspectors found that chatting, calling out, swinging on chairs, passing notes and using mobile phones are "very common" in English schools.   That's fine, it will prepare them for the English workplace.)

According to a study carried out by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, UK schoolchildren are taking up pop instruments due to the influence of reality TV shows like the X Factor. (In 1999 the instrument plaed by most kids was the recorder, in 2014 it is the electric keyboard. 1999 Recorder – 19% Keyboard – 9% Piano – 8% Acoustic guitar – 5% Drums – 4% Violin – 2% Flute – 2% Electric guitar – 1% Percussion – 1% Bass guitar – 0% 2014 Keyboard – 30% Piano – 28% Recorder – 28% Acoustic guitar – 20% Drums – 14% Electric guitar – 13% Violin – 12% Flute – 7% Percussion – 6% Bass guitar – 5% I would think that with synthesisers, the electric keyboard encompasses all the instruments.) 

The average size of class in a state school in the UK is 21. (The average public school (that's the one you pay for) classroom contains 10 pupils. The maximum size used to be 30, but the UK government recently relaxed rules so that class sizes can now be 31 or more, due to a rise in demand for places. I taught a class of 31 adults once. That was fun.)

According to research carried out by Oxford University Press, British children are struggling to write “simple, everyday words”. (They are failing to spot the difference between words like “their” and “there” or “cloths” and “clothes”, to pick out silent letters or spot the difference between a single or double letter word. The top spelling error was "accidentally", closely followed by "practising", “frantically” "definitely" and "believe". Other common misspellings included words such as “surprise”, "excitement", "weird", "doesn't" and "minute”. I can see I'm going to have to add some more spelling tests to the site.)

The UK government has announced plans to spend £85m building a secure college in Leicestershire that will hold up to 320 young people in custody.. (This should go under "sad facts", because it's in reaction to the number of deaths in custody over the last 10 years.  During that time, 163 young people under the age of 24 have killed themselves in prison in the UK The secure college is planned to be the first step towards several other so called "fortified schools" that will eventually cater for the vast majority of young offenders.)

This might surprise you, but in the UK, in the 2012 academic year, 41,224 penalty notices for non-attendance at school were issued to parents. (That's 56,000 children bunking off every day.   The parents get penalised because in UK law it is the legal responsibility of parents to ensure their children attend school from the ages of five to 16. The good news is that the number of persistent truants - those who missed more than a month of schooling - dropped by nearly 60,000 from 392,305 to 333,850. Some schools offer incentive schemes, and free breakfasts for classes with the best attendance, but the UK still has the highest truancy rate amongst developed nations, and it certainly isn't because of the lovely weather.)

This goes nicely with what Poetria said in today's reading on Skype .  Only 0.5% of the £95.6 billion budget for the NHS goes on food. (According to official figures some hospitals spend as little as 69p on each meal.  That might be about to change as hospitals, schools and prisons are about to be told to buy British.  Whether that will improve the quality of the food is debatable, but it will certainly make it more expensive.)  http://www.learnenglish.de/vocabulary/food.html

Davina Wakelin, headmistress at Meeching Valley Primary School in Newhaven, East Sussex, has sent a letter to all parents about swearing. (She wasn't so much complaining about the children swearing, she was asking the parents to stop swearing around their children, especially on and around school premises, after pupils had been caught repeating swear words that they had heard their and other parents using. She wrote: I have received complaints regarding parents swearing when bringing children to and from school. Swearing is not permitted on school grounds and I ask all parents to think about the language you use when on school grounds. Thank you for your consideration with this matter. Tell them to wash their mouths out with soap, and stick them on the naughty step.