TEACHERS, musicians and academics have warned that new Higher music courses are being “dumbed down” and could leave gifted pupils illequipped for a future career.
The revised exam programme will be introduced from next year, and jazz artists Tommy Smith and Cathie Rae have joined a growing chorus of concern about standards.
For the thousand ormore nervous first years who recently moved into Legoland blocks on the treelined Heriot Watt University campus west of Edinburgh, it is a hopeful time. As with the half of all young Scots who now go on to higher education, they are setting out on what they expect will be the start of a bright future.
But a young man tending the bar at Geordie’s in the student union could tell a sorrier tale.
A row between education’s governing bodies in England and Scotland may mean Scottish pupils are losing out when competing for university places.
Experts believe English grade inflation is making comparisons between A levels and Scottish qualifications increasingly difficult, and the credit given to pupils who pass Advanced Highers in particular needs to be re-evaluated.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) has asked for a benchmarking exercise for the Advanced Higher, but the Department forEducation and Skills (DfES) and Scottish Executive education department (SEED) cannot agree on who should fund the process.
Oxford and Cambridge universities say they consider the Advanced Higher as a more testing qualification and will accept students with lower grades than in equivalent A-level subjects.
It is a further indication that the A-level, once regarded as Britain’s “gold standard” qualification, has been discredited.
A-level results released last week showed pass rates rising for the 23rd consecutive year to a new high of 96.2%. Almost 23% of candidates are now awarded an A grade. The Advanced Higher pass rate stands at 74.5%, an increase of just 1% since the exam’s introduction in 2000.
In grand houses, it was firmly below stairs and inhabited by servants. In more modest ones, it was often a sultry little room where the woman of the house was expected to spend up to 12 hours a day bent over a Belfast sink.
The once humble kitchen has long since outgrown its subordinate role. Today’s ideal homes are built around a hub of domestic industry, a functional space that combines the features of a well-equipped area for preparing food with a drawing/ dining room for entertaining and a family
room for chewing the fat and doing homework.
While modern architects can meet this demand relatively easily, it can be difficult for those adapting an older property. The boxy shape of a fitted kitchen looks ungainly when transplanted into a splendid high-ceilinged period room, more used to adornment with fine furniture and antique furniture is not usually suitable for a modern kitchen.
Heller was synonymous with Catch-22; the same might be said of Michael Cunningham and The Hours. After two well received but slow-selling novels, A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, published in 1990 and 1995, The Hours transported Cunningham into an elite league where critical and commercial success go hand in hand. The subsequent film, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, with a hypnotic score by Philip Glass, served merely to confirm the arrival on the block of a new literary superstar. He won a Pulitzer and enough credit to pursue his own dream.
The result is Specimen Days, which borrows the title of Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries.
Fist published in the Herald, 2005.
Gemma means everything to me. I love her to bits.
She knows if I’m feeling rough or a bit ill. And I know that even if I shout at her, she’ll still be there the next day. She gives me 100% love and I give her the same, ” says Eric.
To the homeless man, the six year-old mongrel at his heel is more than a pet. And while trooping about the town at her master’s side may be not bad as a dog’s life goes, he worried about the toll homelessness would take on her health.
The image of the biological clock calling time on a woman’s fertility has been used to stereotype the “Bridget Jones” generation of women who postpone settling down and having children . . . but now a world expert on male fertility claims it also ticks for men.
Later this month Malcolm and Pauline Dixon will find out if they have defeated the government and can start a family, writes Jackie Kemp.
All they wanted was an ordinary family life – the kind most people take for granted. Cautious, do-it-by-the-book Malcolm Dixon and Pauline, his wife, did not foresee that their lives would be transformed to the point where they would mount a legal challenge against a government minister.
“What does it say to people about the importance of a school board, if you tell them ‘It doesn’t matter what you call it and you can set it up however you like?'” says Cathy McCulloch, chair of the school board at her son’s primary, St Mary’s in Leith, Edinburgh.
Her views are representative of many within the school boards community in Scotland, as the Executive consults on sweeping changes to the system for involving parents in education – which effectively mean the abolition of boards.
The new draft bill means schools will be able to decide for themselves how to set up their own body, how many people will be on it and what it will do and be called.
The draft legislation is too vague, according to McCulloch, who is also co-director of the children’s parliament.
The establishment want to say that everything in the educational garden is lovely and the failures are the fault of feral children and feckless parents. The politicians at the moment just seem to accept that. I don’t know why they are so lily-livered. After all, they wouldn’t be with any other industry.”
Chris Woodhead is in combative mood.
But as the mention of his name alone is enough to induce high blood pressure in many staffrooms, this is little surprise. He’s been railing against the status quo since he was chief inspector of English schools in the late 1990s.
They’re called by different names, some more acceptable than others. Child prodigies, gifted kids – in the USA they are simply nerds or geeks, and summer camps laid on for them are unashamedly known as “nerd camps”.
Whether you choose any of these terms or the more politically correct title of “able pupils”, things may be about to get better for children who have abilities beyond the normal range.
Clinical director at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh Zoe Dunhill has written back: “Yes, but there will be a special doctor there who will treat the hurting when you wake up.”
“We try to explain things in a way that is appropriate to the child, ” Dunhill explains. Soon, she hopes, the approach will help her overcome Scott’s resistance to the treatment.
Dealing with children who refuse consent to treatment which doctors and parents deem necessary is an increasingly important part of children’s medicine in Scotland.
Every month at this, one of Scotland’s flagship children’s hospitals, several children refuse to undergo procedures.
IT might have a Paisley postcode, but the island of Lismore, with its view of the west coast mountains of Morvern, is 150 miles from Glasgow. Home to just 160 people, it feels a world away from Scotland’s urban corridor; further still from Westminster. Policy wonks in the juice bars of Soho may be frothing about the coming general election, but from this distance their effervescence seems strangely flat. All the major parties are competing for the affections of a creature brought to life by today’s political myth-makers to encapsulate Britain in 2005. Where once they wooed Mondeo Man, now their quarry is Do-it-all Woman, who has a job, children and elderly relatives to care for. The election may not be the talk of Lismore’s one shop, but here, as everywhere else in Britain, there are many women – and men – whose lives are a patchwork of these different roles. So how does the prospect of a Labour third term affect them?
WHEN Rachel Brand discovered she had a brain tumour, her life was turned upside down. The management consultant, who is in her 30s, underwent surgery. Yet two years later, she had to cope with the news that the tumour was growing back and that she faced more surgery followed by radiotherapy. Not surprisingly, she has struggled with feelings of depression and isolation. But Rachel’s saving grace has been a surprising one – singing. During a period off work after her first diagnosis she decided to pursue her love of jazz and singing, an interest she had put to one side for many years. Soon she found herself heading north from her London home to Edinburgh where she took a five-day course with jazz vocalists and teachers Fionna Duncan and Sophie Bancroft. It changed her life.
AS many as 10,000 trees would have to be cut down to make way for a golf resort on an estate, local campaigners claimed yesterday.
Felling has already started at the Archerfield estate in East Lothian, and the directors of the Duke of Hamilton’s holding company, Hamilton Kinneil, will today make a final decision on whether to sign over the lease of the woods for 99 years to Renaissance Golf Design, a USbacked firm, and Tom Doak, the course designer.
Children’s health is an emotive issue, so the question of how best to improve health services for the nation’s children is a knotty problem. It is also one which some of the best brains in the NHS are currently tackling, and is viewed as the key to improving the country’s poor showing in international league tables in the years to come.
It may be freezing but “a simmering pot of volcanic ash” is hotting up and ready to explode across Britain. So said a spokesman for the protest group Fathers 4 Justice yesterday, angry about the government’s new child-access arrangements.
These men’s anger cannot be doubted. From scaling the walls of Buckingham Palace to bombarding the prime minister with powder, their protests have become increasingly fierce and desperate. Now the government in Westminster has offered some changes, which have been dismissed as mere tinkering by the group. In fact, that is all they are. The package amounts to little more than a restating of the existing position that the court must protect the rights of children. That is all very well, but it does nothing to address the men’s central complaint, which is that they say they are being systematically discriminated against.
Allison Pearson
Evening Standard, London, January 19
“[On Tuesday] the government announced plans to improve the way access to children after divorce is handled. Parents will be given more practical and emotional support. Community service orders and electronic tagging could be imposed on those who deny former partners contact with their kids.
“The plans, though well-meaning, sound both blundering and inadequate. How are kids going to feel towards their father if mum ends up wandering around like a convict with a shackled ankle? This is a fiendish area for legislation: how can you punish an uncooperative parent without hurting her child? … Every child deserves a childhood: it’s battling parents who need to grow up fast – not their innocent kids.”
BROADCASTER Sheena McDonald has revealed how the trauma of recovering from near-fatal brain injuries put pressure on her relationship with journalist partner Alan Little and drove her into a clinical depression. Ms McDonald, who was almost killed when hit by a police van driving on the wrong side of the road six years ago, told the conference in Edinburgh yesterday how her family and partner had also suffered.”Their trauma was psychological but it was perhaps even worse than mine because they were aware of everything that was happening. I don’t think they had any support at all apart from each other.”