A deep dive into why the aesthetics of a book cover shape our reading experience — and whether that judgement is fair.
Read More Buy NowScotland’s national newspapers are in crisis as readership falls, jobs are cut and London-based titles muscle in.
Scots, once the biggest consumers of newsprint in the world, are losing the habit, with the slump hitting home-grown titles the hardest. The writing could now be on the wall for one or all of the three daily Scotland-wide titles, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Daily Record.
The Scottish legal system is letting down victims of child sex abuse, according to an international expert based at Abertay University in Dundee.
Education Guardian
What children put into their mouths at lunchtime has become one of the touchstone political issues of our age and a money-saving plan by Argyll council in Scotland to shut six Hebridean island school kitchens was recently shot down by parental anger.
From the Guardian University Guide
The University of Dundee has motored up the mechanical engineering tables, coming from outside the top 20 last year to third place.
This is the first year that students have built a formula student racing car to race in a university competition at Silverstone – a project that the department head, Robert Keatch, says they are hugely enjoying and which is helping their team-working skills.
Most of the pupils at Girvan academy are smartly dressed in school uniform, shirts and ties, and it seems an unlikely place to find juvenile cocaine experts.
But this school in Ayrshire has piloted an anti-drugs programme on cocaine that is to be rolled out across Scotland. Pupils have worked with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), the government-funded body that develops the curriculum, to come up with a programme that focuses not on the health risks of cocaine use but on its environmental and social damage.
What they long for is people who care’ – Education Guardian
Kathleen Marshall, the first UK children’s commissioner to leave office, tells Jackie Kemp she has never been a fan of playing safe
The ground-floor office a few doors up from the Scottish parliament on Edinburgh’s Holyrood Road has neat venetian blinds and two doors. One is unashamedly dull. The second, smaller door, is shiny, has a bejewelled handle, and is painted with images of mermaids and enchanted forests. Just inside, where other offices have coatstands, is a cardboard wishing tree. Someone has written on one of its paper leaves in a round, firm hand: “I wish I had more one-to-one time with key children.”
The Herald Magazine. Hiking off into the purple yonder with nothing but a sleeping bag and a loo roll – that is camping as it once was and, for some, what it is becoming again. There’s a resurgence in so-calledwild camping in Scotland as the countryside access laws bed in. Forget the designer floral tent with matching curtains, the elegant plastic wine goblets and the pre-cooked lasagne – leave them at home where they belong and head for the horizon with just a toothbrush in your pocket.
Louise Richardson, the new head of St Andrews, will bring ‘American attitudes’ to admissions and to red tape, she tells Jackie Kemp.
St Andrews University … Louise Richardson was previously the dean of a Harvard college
Guardian Education blog. The Lib Dem leader’s policy pledge to reduce early years class sizes may seem like common sense – until we realise how impracticable it is.
Every Good Boy Deserves Failure. And All Cows End Gorily – or is it Eat Grass? Generations of children have struggled over mnemonics designed to help them translate five black lines and a series of dots into music. Some accomplish this feat; some – like me – remember little except these disjointed sentences. But that could soon be history, according to a charity that’s introducing a music notation system to the UK from Finland that is accessible enough for the youngest children to understand. “A revolution in music education is under way,” says Brian Cope, of Drake Music Scotland.
A prominent Scottish professor will denounce the use of education cash to fund “mumbo jumbo” in a public lecture tomorrow.
Professor Sergio Della Sala, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, will use part of a prize-winning public lecture to voice his concern that Scottish schools are paying thousands of pounds to train teachers in controversial techniques such as “brain gym” and “neuro-physiological psychology”. The professor – the first winner of a prize for science communication, named in honour of Tam Dalyell, which will be awarded by the former MP tomorrow – is angry public money is being paid to those he called “pranksters”. Prof Sala says he is “outraged”
All the fairytale-land characters have come together to put on a nativity show. Little Red Riding Hood is playing the part of Mary, Goldilocks is Gabriel, the Three Little Pigs are the wise men and watch out for the innkeeper – it’s the big bad wolf!”
Oh, the swing of the kilt and the skirl of the bagpipes! The tens of thousands who gather annually to try their strength at tossing Scottish cabers around … in Leipzig.
A mania for “the heedrum-hodrum Celtic twilight”, which is afflicting parts of northern Europe, is one of the topics to be researched at a new centre for the study of the Scottish diaspora at Edinburgh University.
But since its launch at the end of last month, the new centre, funded by a £1m donation from a Scottish financier, has been caught up in controversy. Its founder, perhaps Scotland’s foremost historian, Professor Tom Devine, announced in the opening lecture that he intended to challenge the “Burns supper” school of Scottish history. As a result, he has been subject to attacks by nationalists accusing him of “unionist revisionism”.
The little badge was unearthed from a corner of my mother’s ancient sewing box the other night, when she was sewing similar ones on to my children’s scout uniforms.
Councillors entering Glasgow’s magnificent Victorian city chambers will have to be careful not to upset the apple cart as 120 varieties of local apples, harvested by the city’s children, will be put on display on Friday.
More than 1,000 fruit trees have been planted by the city’s schoolchildren, many in or near their playgrounds. The children plant the apple and pear trees, watch them grow and harvest the crop.
“Ca c’est typique! Tu ne comprends pas qu’on vit dans une société de consommateurs?” Pupils from Shawlands academy in Glasgow staged a play about the politics of conservation on an unused island in Pollok Park, an island they reclaimed themselves, wading out in welly boots to cut back the shrubbery and create a natural auditorium.
The Litter Pickers, which featured an argument between Greek goddesses Aphrodite and Hestia – in French – won the school a language award, and was gamely performed alfresco despite skies that threatened rain.
Get on the website of a budget airline to book yourself a holiday and, while you are at it, fool around with the site code so that you can pick your own price. For tomorrow, show your workings. That is the kind of homework students on a new MSc in ethical hacking at Dundee’s University of Abertay might be set. Although, of course, the website they use won’t be a real one but a cod version for in-house use set up by a tutor – or even a fellow postgrad.
We live in the age of ”McSex” – fast, easy, and cheap. Young women need to be helped to ”say no to soul-less sex”. ”They are having a lot of sex with a lot of different men without realising the emotional whack of that. They are feeling it is something they absolutely have to do. We have spoken to hundreds of young women and they hated what they were doing.” The words of some Bible-bashing right-winger?
No – Cosmopolitan, the free-thinking magazine that discovered the G spot. Editor Lorraine Candy told a debate to mark 100 years of women’s suffrage on Radio Four yesterday that it was time to ”pull back” on sexual liberation because young women were being damaged by it.
Nine o’clock is known to broadcasters as ”the watershed”. It is the magic hour when small people are presumed to be in their beds and their parents, having started the dishwasher and swept a tidal wave of coloured plastic into the toy cupboard and wedged the door shut, are sitting down, putting their feet up and reaching for the remote control.
SUSTAINABILITY has become a touchstone of modern Scottish politics.
Once a dish associated with the lentil-supping, tree-hugging fringe, it is now served with almost everything on the political agenda. More than a buzzword, “sustainability” is becoming a kind of new-age industry with a legion of civil servants, engineers, academics employed in thinking of new ways for Scotland to move towards a huge 80% reduction in carbon emissions in the next 30 years.