Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/3/2018 i The Big Issue

This week The Big Issue focuses on education and what the school system needs in order to make it fit for the future. I’m from the travelling community, so I didn’t have formal schooling. My mum taught me to read and write, and my father taught me my trade. I had nine brothers, three sisters and lots of cousins, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out on time with other kids. I didn’t know any different. We look at the current reality of home educating on page 26. I’m a good salesman by now but for those who want to improve their skills we examine lifelong learning on page 29. And you can read my story on page 54.…

Giving cash to rough sleepers is by no means a silver bullet – the complexities of homelessness are harder to solve than by giving a few pounds to make it go away. Last week there were two contrasting tales that clearly illustrated this. The first starred Cameroon legend Samuel Eto’o, the most decorated African footballer of all time. Eto’o rushed to the aid of former national team captain Norbert Owona, visiting the 67-year-old in hospital after he was discovered sleeping rough in Douala following the death of his wife and children. Ex-Barcelona striker Eto’o gave Owona £750 as well as pledging to buy him a house. The Cameroon nation is waiting to see if Eto’o will deliver on his promise. Another, more cautionary, tale comes from Philadelphia. Last year, homeless…

I was all ready to do a podcast on ‘How to Change the World’, but it has been delayed until the autumn. There are already so many books, manifestos, radio and TV programmes that have been made on this topic – so many sincere beliefs by sincere people (although there are those that are less than sincere). So, why I would enter the “Here’s the wisdom you’ve all been looking for but couldn’t find” game? Aside from delusions of grandeur and my Napoleonic complex, I’ve spent hours writing about and hours telling the story of it, arriving like a misty feeling on a wet slum day in Notting Hill aged seven, I do believe that everyone else has not quite got it right. Loaded down with self-delusion and slummery still…

The romantic notion of education as the great social leveller is indelibly implanted in our national consciousness. The country’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was the daughter of a shopkeeper who went to Oxford University. Adele, the singer-songwriter from Tottenham who has sold 100 million records, attributes her success to gaining a place at the BRIT School for Performing Arts. The son of immigrants, Harry Kroto, who went on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry, said his life changed when he secured a scholarship at a local grammar school. Yet these are the notable exceptions to the overwhelming pattern observed for schools and universities. We have unrealistic expectations of our education system as an engine of social mobility. Teachers do an amazing job. But the idea that they…

The debt crisis continues to grow in the UK – but is our understanding of how to pay our bills growing with it? Bombarded with small print and contradictory figures at every turn, it can be hard to grasp complex financial concepts. And credit company warnings are calling into question whether we are getting the financial information needed to make the decisions that keep a roof over our head. Debt charity StepChange revealed last year that the number of younger clients seeking debt advice has grown by 10 per cent in the last five years. The loss of private tenancy remains the single biggest driver of homelessness, according to government figures, with rental arrears a key reason as people struggle to find the cash to cover it. But in theory…

In England parents don’t need local authority approval to educate their child at home, and there is no need to register children who are home educated with the authorities. A 2018 report found a 40 per cent rise in numbers of children being home educated between 2014 and 2017, from 34,000 to 48,000. But numbers are not officially recorded. Lord Soley’s Private Member’s Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill, which calls for registering, monitoring and measuring of home education, is due its second reading in the Commons on October 26. In Scotland any parent wishing to withdraw their child from the state school system to home educate them needs permission from the local authority. If they have never been in the system a parent does not need to register…

Creative subjects in schools are in serious peril. Over generations, they’ve repeatedly come up against sideways sneers that they’re lightweight, but now the main threat (for pupils in England at least) seems to be aimed directly from above. Government plans for the new English Baccalaureate (EBacc) discount creative, artistic and technical subjects from school league tables and will make at least seven academic GCSEs compulsory, squeezing out everything else for many pupils. The effects are already being felt. Last month, the Joint Council for Qualifications revealed there had been a 10 per cent drop in the uptake of creative GCSEs in just one year. Performing and expressive arts numbers fell by a devastating 45 per cent, again in just 12 months. But the fightback has begun. More than 200 organisations…

HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE by Alice Munro This has my favourite story in it – Post and Beam, about a woman whose cousin comes to visit from her small-town home, and is forced to realise that the front she puts up, to show how well she’s doing, isn’t quite true. FRANNY AND ZOOEY by JD Salinger Two stories about the precocious Glass family, brilliant at describing the kind of intense intricacy of ordinary life. There’s a great 20-page conversation between a mother and her son while he’s taking a bath. THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER by Alan Sillitoe I spent my last year at university reading non-course books – mostly English novels of the Fifties and Sixties, like John Braine’s A Room at the Top or Stan…

Grammar drama I would have thought that an editor would have had a high level of education. I have just read your editorial in The Big Issue [August 27-September 2] and am disappointed grammatical [sic] errors in your article. Not only is it incorrect; it does not even make sense. Which school did you attend and who on earth was you [sic] English teacher. Obviously Fowlers [sic] Usage and Abusage of the English Language was not adhered to. I quote your words: “What is Brexit, asked colleagues from Korea. And Taiwan. And Japan.” It should be: “What is Brexit asked colleagues from Korea, Taiwan and Japan?” One NEVER starts a sentence with And. Neither does one use a comma prior to BUT. If asking a question where is the question…

It was with more than a hint of irony that payday loan pioneers Wonga slipped into administration without any sign of a last-minute influx of cash. Board members had already poured in £10m in a bid to keep the ailing company afloat just six years after it touted a US stock exchange flotation worth £1bn. But it was to no avail as the rags-to-riches story was punctured by a sea of compensation claims after the government cracked down on payday lenders. The Big Issue has always rallied against the inequity of firms who look to make a quick profit out of the most vulnerable with sky-high interest rates, and our founder John Bird is continuing his battle for fair credit with his Creditworthiness Assessment Bill.…

Our vendor Amanda Hill was such a star hit when she sold The Big Issue at Pride Cymru last week that a fan club grew seeking her autograph. Cardiff seller Amanda, 40, braved the rain to sell 54 magazines during her stint at the annual LGBT celebration in the city and had customers clamouring for her signature after they spotted her featured in the My Pitch section of the magazine. “I had a really good time at Pride,” said Amanda, who identifies as pansexual and has family members who are gay. “I had a good reaction mostly and managed to sell a lot of people came up to me and told me that they hoped that my luck would improve going forward. Quite a few told me that they had…

Salman Rushdie I came from India to Rugby in England [for boarding school] when I was 13. By 16 I was a pretty conventional public school conservative. With one exception – I had no idea when I came to school that I would be judged as someone who was different to the others because I wasn’t English-white. It really was a harsh awakening. It gave me a difficult time in these early years. I had been happy until I came to school in England. I’ve often thought if I’d been good at games my background wouldn’t have mattered. There were a few other Indian/ Pakistani boys who were outstanding cricketers and they didn’t seem to have the same experience. But I was lousy at games. Ozzy Osbourne I’m extremely dyslexic…

15/30 The UK is below average at teaching financial education, coming 15th out of 30 in a league table (OECD) 30 % of people said they considered purchases carefully, one of the lowest rates (OECD) £120 the average debt of a vulnerable adult eight months after working with MyBnk’s Money House, down from £300 (MyBnk) of parents want more financial education and are happy to reduce time spent on core national curriculum subjects for this (MyBnk) 0 The number of teachers who thought financial education was very effective. Only a third thought that it was somewhat effective (The Money Charity) 19% of teachers are not confident in teaching the subject (APPG for Financial Education)…

Education can, to the untrained eye seem more fraught and fractured than ever before. Employers and celebratory commentators routinely call for our outdated, ‘Victorian’ system to be reformed and for schools to focus on so-called ‘21st-century skills’. With the relentless increase of automation and the gig economy, traditional jobs will no longer be available and so the education system must somehow prepare children for jobs that haven’t yet been invented. Twenty-one years ago, Tony Blair told the nation that his three priorities were education, education, education. In the intervening years almost twice as many people go to university, but with the increasing burden of tuition fees many feel higher education is beyond them. At the same time, teachers and teaching unions report being choked by meaningless paperwork, perverse accountability demands…

I have just read with great interest your article ‘Will landmark ruling rewrite the book on library closures?’ [August 20-26]. Although it is not often discussed in the media, England and Wales (and, for all I know, Scotland) need to allow greater control of income and expenditure to revert to local authorities. Three or four years ago, when cutbacks were exhibiting themselves in the form of reduced local services, I mentioned to one of my local councillors (I live in the Eltham North ward in Royal Greenwich) that we would soon arrive at the point where he and his colleagues could include in their election manifesto plans to improve local services so long as people would accept a few pennies on the rates. In reply, he explained that for every…

It feels a very long way from Tony Blair’s Education, Education, Education speech. Then, as the New Labour machine swept all before it, the bright new hope for Britain explained his three priorities. In the intervening 21 years, the percentage of people going to university has almost doubled. But much else has also changed. The introduction of university fees has placed a debt burden on graduates. And while this can be viewed as a success tax, to be repaid by those who will gain better-paid employment, the changing job landscape – a gig economy and the shadow of increasing automation – has meant that the value of that success is increasingly unclear. There are governmental statistics about the upticks in secondary education, many tied to academies, but teachers and teaching…

Germany No prizes for guessing where the concept of ‘kindergarten’ – a transitional pre-school easing kids into formal education – originated. German primary education lasts for four years before pupils are separated into different schools depending on ability (and parents’ wishes). The Gymnasium is for children who intend to continue on to university; the Realschule is mostly vocational, with the option for pupils to switch to the Gymnasium; and Hauptschule is also vocational, with subjects taught at a slower pace. China Like their Finnish counterparts, children in China begin primary school at age seven, with most of the week spent studying Chinese and maths (known as ‘the big two’). Pupils prepare for the gaokao, the exam which determines their entry to university. This exam is a staggering nine hours long…

In a way my decision to home educate my children was because I knew they wouldn’t get my experience of education. I went through mainstream schooling. I went to a little village primary school which had 100 kids, the teachers knew everybody, if it was a nice day we had lessons outside. There was no testing at primary level. I went to a private secondary school on an assisted-place scheme and did nine O-levels. Now they have all these hoops to jump through, which seems to be getting worse every year. When my daughter was born in 2000 I looked at what was going on in education, and by the time she was three or four they were bringing in SATs, and I thought, no. We’ll do home education for…

This week The Big Issue has turned its attention to running the rule over the state of schools – but one teacher has flipped the script to use the magazine as a teaching tool. Sharon Godfrey purchased scores of magazines to introduce her classes at Newton Abbot College in Devon to The Big Issue and homelessness. Kids from years seven to 12 swapped textbooks for the mag and used it to inspire spoken word and dramatic performances that delved into issues associated with life on the streets, including monologues exploring PTSD and mental health issues, as well as addiction. “We worked quite hard right across my own group and across the campus as a whole,” says Sharon. “We did a body of work on homelessness because that is something that…