More miscellaneous details

Tag: education

  • Free tech eliminates the fear of public speaking – University of Cambridge

    As revealed in a recent publication from Macdonald – Director of the Immersive Technology Lab at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge – the platform increases levels of confidence and enjoyment for most users after a single 30-minute session. In the most recent trial with students from Cambridge and UCL, it was found that a week of self-guided use was beneficial to 100% of users. The platform helped participants feel more prepared, adaptable, resilient, confident, better able to manage anxiety. […]

    With the new VR platform, a user can experience the sensation of presenting to a wide range of photorealistic audiences. What makes Macdonald’s invention unique is that it uses what he calls ‘overexposure therapy’ where users can train in increasingly more challenging photorealistic situations – eventually leading to extreme scenarios that the user is unlikely to encounter in their lifetime. They might begin by presenting to a small and respectful audience but as they progress, the audience sizes increase and there are more distractions: spectators begin to look disinterested, they walk out, interrupt, take photos, and so on. A user can progress to the point where they can present in a hyper-distracting stadium environment with loud noises, panning stadium lights and 10,000 animated spectators.

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  • No rise in private school closures in England since Labour’s VAT proposal, data shows – The Guardian

    More than 75 private schools closed every year in England on average over the last decade, official data has shown, with no apparent increase in the trend since Labour announced it was imposing VAT on fees. A number of media reports have highlighted the closure of some private schools as supposedly being caused by the policy, which is intended to raise money for more teachers in state schools. […]

    But data from a government register of private schools in England, collated in response to a parliamentary question tabled by the shadow education secretary, Damian Hinds, indicated that a churn in individual institutions is a longstanding trend. Since 1987, when data started to be collected, 2,583 schools have opened and 2,674 have shut. In the years from 2013 to 2023, 847 schools closed – an average of 77 a year. The 2024 data, which goes up to 6 October, shows that 46 schools have closed, slightly below the average trend, with 77 opening.

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  • Private senior school closes due to soaring costs – BBC News

    A private school in Lancashire is no longer financially viable and is having to close at short notice, its head teacher has confirmed. Jonathan Harrison, who is also proprietor of the Moorland School in Clitheroe, wrote to parents and carers on Wednesday to say the senior school would shut its doors on Friday. He explained Moorland could no longer operate because of factors including the imposition of VAT on school fees, falling numbers of full-fee paying students, uncollected fees, and higher operating costs.

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  • Shock as Fulneck School, Pudsey, announces closure – Bradford Telegraph and Argus

    “This decision was not taken lightly, with trustees considering all available and viable options to ensure the school could continue. However, after careful consideration and no offers materialising, the difficult decision to plan to close the school was taken. Parents and employees have been informed, and we have now entered into a formal consultation process with Fulneck School employees whose roles may be affected. Our priority is now to work with all affected staff, pupils and parents to minimise the impact on them and support them throughout this process.”

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  • Fulneck School: Leeds private school announces shock closure with ‘deep regret’ after opening in 1753 – Yorkshire Evening Post

    The school statement read: “Despite the dedicated efforts of the school and the Fulneck Trustees to sustain pupil numbers, a continued decline in enrolment, combined with rising operational costs, has made it increasingly challenging to maintain financial viability. … The Trustees, Board of Governors and the school are “committed to ensuring that the school year finishes as planned”, with all teaching continuing until the end of the school year and pupils completing public and internal examinations as intended. In order to help students and families secure alternative schooling from September 2025 onwards, the school will be hosting a School Fair on April 2 at 2pm, with representatives from other independent schools set to be present.

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  • Unauthorised school absence widening ‘disadvantage gap’ in England – The Guardian

    School leaders endorsed the EPI’s analysis. Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “Too often, the burden of ensuring children attend school falls entirely on teachers and leaders, who are then held accountable for absences beyond their control. “Without a broader system of support, it is extremely difficult for schools to drive meaningful change in attendance rates.” Di’Iasio said that “for some families, school seems to have become – at least in part – optional”, and said fines for taking unauthorised termtime holidays were failing to halt that trend. “Far from solving the problem, fines often deepen tensions between schools and parents. Schools, simply enforcing the rules, are left looking like the villains,” Di’Iasio told the ASCL’s annual conference on Saturday.

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  • EBacc may ‘constrain choices’, curriculum review chair says – Schools Week

    The EBacc “may constrain” pupils’ choices and “limit access to” vocational and arts subjects, Professor Becky Francis has said as she outlined areas the curriculum and assessment review panel believe “need further attention”. Francis, who is leading the government’s curriculum and assessment review, also stated that “the current construction and balance” of some subjects “appears to be “inhibiting mastery, hindering progress and undermining standards”.

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  • UK universities warned to ‘stress-test’ assessments as 92% of students use AI – The Guardian

    Students say they use genAI to explain concepts, summarise articles and suggest research ideas, but almost one in five (18%) admitted to including AI-generated text directly in their work. “When asked why they use AI, students most often find it saves them time (51%) and improves the quality of their work (50%),” the report said. “The main factors putting them off using AI are the risk of being accused of academic misconduct and the fear of getting false or biased results.” […]

    Students generally believe their universities have responded effectively to concerns over academic integrity, with 80% saying their institution’s policy is “clear” and 76% believe their institution would spot the use of AI in assessments. Only a third (36%) of students have received training in AI skills from their university. “They dance around the subject,” said one student. “It’s not banned but not advised, it’s academic misconduct if you use it, but lecturers tell us they use it. Very mixed messages.”

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  • ‘Barricade the doors’: Pupil describes school lockdown terror as boy killed – ITV News

    Sixth former Divine said: “I went outside and I saw three year 11s shouting, ‘someone got stabbed, come here’ to a teacher. I didn’t believe it at first so I went outside to see what was going on.” He said he saw a body on the ground. Despite a major emergency services response, the boy died at the scene.”I ran upstairs to the sixth form area and said ‘there’s a lockdown, there’s a lockdown, someone’s got stabbed’,” Divine said. “And then all the teachers started taking people to classrooms. I was really really scared, I didn’t believe it at first, but I saw what I saw… the staff were scared – they didn’t know what to do but then they started saying ‘go into classrooms, lock the doors, shut the blinds, barricade the doors’ because they didn’t know if the person with the knife was on the loose or was trying to get other people as well.” Divine’s brother, Leon, was at home when he was called by his brother. He said: “It doesn’t feel real, it feels like America – but this is Sheffield.”

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  • Without universal AI literacy, AI will fail us – World Economic Forum

    For example, facial analysis software has been recorded failing to recognize people with dark skin, showing a 1-in-3 failure rate when identifying darker-skinned females. Other AI tools have denied social security benefits to people with disabilities. These failings are due to bias in data and lack of diversity in the teams developing AI systems. According to the Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap report, only 32% of those in data and AI roles are women. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that less than 2% of technical employees at Google and Facebook were black. […]

    We cannot leave the burden of AI responsibility and fairness on the technologists who design it. These tools affect us all, so they should be affected by us all — students, educators, non-profits, governments, parents, businesses. We need all hands on deck.

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  • Ofsted sets out proposals for fairer education inspections and new, more detailed report cards – GOV.UK

    The Big Listen returned a clear message from parents, carers and professionals that the overall effectiveness grade should go, and that inspection reports should provide a more nuanced view of a provider’s strengths and areas for improvement. But there were different views on how to do that. Parents and carers favoured a clear assessment of a wider set of categories, while most professionals wanted narrative descriptions of performance. Today’s proposals aim to bring both preferences together.

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  • Ofsted offers first look at new report cards for schools – BBC News

    Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the plans would generate a “new league table based on the sum of Ofsted judgements across at least 40 points of comparison”. It would be “bewildering for teachers and leaders, never mind the parents whose choices these reports are supposedly intended to guide”, he added. Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the plans would “do little to reduce the enormous pressure school leaders are under”. Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said the five-point grading scale “maintains the current blunt, reductive approach that cannot capture the complexity of school life nor provide more meaningful information to parents”.

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  • Improving the way Ofsted inspects education: consultation document – GOV.UK

    The independent research we commissioned as part of the Big Listen polled other ways we could report on providers. Parents ranked ‘separate judgements for each inspection area’ highest (76% in favour). Professionals ranked this as the third highest (53% in favour). The highest rated options for professionals were ‘bullet point summaries of our findings’ (65% in favour) and ‘narrative descriptions’ (59% in favour). Taking this feedback into account, we propose using a 5-point scale to grade different areas of a provider’s work, such as ‘curriculum’ and ‘leadership’. Alongside grades, we will have short descriptions summarising our findings. These evaluations will make up our new education inspection report cards. There will be no overall effectiveness grade for early years, state-funded schools, non-association independent schools, FE and skills or ITE inspections.

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  • Ofqual to fine Pearson £250k over exams rules breaches – GOV.UK

    The breaches, which occurred in 2023, included failing to identify conflicts of interest among GCSE, A level and BTEC examiners, who were also employed by Pearson as tutors at schools where students sat the exams. Pearson also failed to follow its own policies designed to ensure the confidentiality of exam papers.

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  • Data protection in schools – Record keeping and management – Guidance – GOV.UK

    How to carry out an audit to check what personal data your school holds. You can use a data retention schedule to document how long you’ll keep different types of data for. The Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR says you should only keep data for as long as you need it. You should check each year what data you hold and if you still need to keep it. If you identify any information you no longer need, you should dispose of it safely. It’s important to put in place policies and processes so you can prove and evidence that you’re not keeping data for longer than necessary.

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  • Record keeping and retention information for academies and academy trusts – GOV.UK

    Academies and trusts should follow good practice and retain records about: pupils – a pupil record is defined in section 12 of the key stage 2 assessment and reporting arrangements; staff; buildings; finance; governance; the history of the school or academy (if applicable, including the ‘school history’ prior to the conversion to an academy) – examples can be found in The National Archives’ research guide on schools. All records should be retained in line with regulations and retention guidelines. Details can be found in the Academy Trust Handbook and Data protection in schools – record keeping and management.

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  • Education Secretary gives Bett Show 2025 keynote address – GOV.UK

    Over two thirds of those using generative AI in education say it’s having a positive impact. And we’re going further. Last week I announced that £1 million of funding has been awarded to 16 developers to help teachers with marking and tailored feedback for students. And my department continues to support the Oak National Academy, whose AI lesson assistant is helping teachers to plan personalised high quality lessons in minutes. And for children, that means more attention, higher standards, better life chances. For teachers, less paperwork, lower stress, fewer drains on their valuable time.

    Using AI to reduce work or help unlock the recruitment and retention crisis that we face, so that once again teaching can be a profession that sparks joy, not burnout. Where teachers can focus on what really matters, teaching our children. But not just teachers. We need to support leaders and finance professionals in schools too. That’s what DfE connect is all about. A one stop shop for leaders and administrators. It’s already helping academies to manage their finances, and we’ve just released new features that will help them understand and access new funding.

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  • Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens – Sage Journals

    Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

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  • Could reliance on AI harm critical thinking in young people? Researchers have their worries – South China Morning Post

    According to the British study, published on January 3 in the peer-reviewed journal Societies, analysis of responses from more than 650 people aged 17 and over showed evidence of lower critical thinking skills among young people who used AI extensively. “Younger participants who exhibited higher dependence on AI tools scored lower in critical thinking compared to their older counterparts,” wrote study author Michael Gerlich from the SBS Swiss Business School. “This trend underscores the need for educational interventions that promote critical engagement with AI technologies, ensuring that the convenience offered by these tools does not come at the cost of essential cognitive skills.” […]

    In a separate study published in September, a team from Sweden identified 139 questionable papers on computing, environment, health and other research fields on the academic search engine Google Scholar. The Swedish researchers said the papers contained common responses used by ChatGPT, including “as of my last knowledge update” and “I don’t have access to real-time data”, but did not declare the use of AI. While most of the papers appeared in journals that are not indexed in reputable bibliographic databases, some were published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings, according to the study. Some of the identified papers were found in university databases and were attributed to students, the researchers said. “The abundance of fabricated ‘studies’ seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardise the integrity of the scientific record,” they warned.

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  • AI teacher tools set to break down barriers to opportunity – GOV.UK

    Kids are set to benefit from a better standard of teaching through more face time with teachers – powered by AI – as the Government sets the country on course to mainline AI into the fabric of society, helping turbocharge our Plan for Change and breaking down the barriers of opportunity. £1 million has been set aside for 16 developers to create AI tools to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored feedback for individual students in a fraction of the time, so teachers can focus on delivering brilliant lessons. […]

    The prototype AI tools, to be developed by April 2025, will draw on a first-of-its-kind AI store of data to ensure accuracy – so teachers can be confident in the information training the tools. The world-leading content store, backed by £3 million funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will pool and encode curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work which will then be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality content. […]

    Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work, according to a survey from TeacherTapp. However, most AI tools are not specifically trained on the documents that set out how teaching should work in England, and aren’t accurate enough to help teachers with their marking and feedback workload. Training AI tools on the content store can increase feedback accuracy to 92%, up from 67% when no targeted data was provided to a large language model. That means teachers can be assured the tools are safe and reliable for classroom use.

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  • 52 things I learned in 2024 – Tom Whitwell

    4. Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. … 35. People whose surnames start with U, V, W, X, Y or Z tend to get grades 0.6% lower than people with A-to-E surnames. Modern learning management systems sort papers alphabetically before they’re marked, so those at the bottom are always seen last, by tired, grumpy markers. A few teachers flip the default setting and mark Z to A, and their results are reversed. … 47. In 2024, around 10% of Anguilla’s GDP will come from fees for its .ai domain name.
    education internet lists movies

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  • The Best Available Human standard – One Useful Thing

    The world is full of entrepreneurs-in-waiting because most entrepreneurial journeys end before they begin. This comprehensive study shows around 1/3 of Americans have had a startup idea in the last 5 years but few act on it — less than half even do any web research! This matches my own experience an entrepreneurship professor (and former entrepreneur). The number one question I get asked is “what do I do now?” While books and courses can help, there is nothing like an experienced cofounder… except, as my research with Jason Greenberg suggests, experienced cofounders are not only hard to find and incentivize, but picking the wrong cofounder can hurt the success of the company because of personality conflicts and other issues. All of this is why AI may be the Best Available Cofounder for many people. It is no substitute for quality human help, but it might make a difference for many potential entrepreneurs who would otherwise not get any assistance.

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