thehomeworkspot.com

In my Mother’s generation, learning to cook was the main output of a girls education (although my Mother even went as far to learn how to teach Home Economics!). In this generation, Food Technology (as it is now known) is considered a bit of a coasting lesson,  fills in the time, and sometimes (if you get it right or have skilled friends) you get something yummy to eat too!

But should schools place more focus on this lesson? With obesity on the rise, and our budgets being stretched more and more as prices go up and wages disappear into redundancy, we need cost effective ways of keeping house.

So who will teach the kids how to do this? Parents (who might not know how to do this themselves) or the schools? Where should a prents job end and a schools job start?

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Just over 40 years ago, 14,000 British children, aged 11, were asked to write a 30-minute essay on were they aimed to be as a grown up. Now in their early 50’s, these people have been asked to review and comment upon their essay, and how closely they have managed to follow their plan for their life.

Surprisingly, a good percentage of people managed to achieve most of what they set out to do; most interestingly, a good percentage of the girls that wrote their essays saw themselves in the workplace, as well as getting married and having kids.

If this generation of 11 year old’s were asked to write the same essay… firstly, would they? secondly, would they consider marriage and children and a home life as a desirable future? thirdly, would they have the support from schools and family’s to dare to dream, and dare to pursue that dream?

Modern life has given us liberties and opportunities that our parents and grandparents couldn’t even comprehend; but is it always for our own good?

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Education can be a very costly process. The more you can get for free then the better and easier it will be on your wallet. Thatcher put an end to the best freebie from school, the milk! There was nothing better than shaking your milk till the cream formed at the top!

For parents primary and high school are very costly, for less privileged parents you can get dinner vouchers and clothing vouchers for uniform. Many schools are turning into cashless systems so everything is done with slips and payment cards which the parents fill in. Buying your dinner at school every day 5 days a week for 6 years racks up. I always wanted my school dinner but my mum said it was cheaper to take butties!

You move onto collage and the onus is still on the parent, its still down to them to finance you usually, maybe if you want to eat hot lunces you start to take your own money, after all your old enough to look after yourself at that age.

Then university roles along. University can cripple you, trust me ive been crippled by uni, Many people see students as trying to sponge money and free stuff but its not until your in university trying to live on not very much you appreciate what you need to do. There are still grants available but as i found you really have to be in a scary position financially to actually get any money from the authorities.

Its at times like this when i looked to discount vouchers. Discount vouchers or Voucher codes can be found online and they usually provide discounts or free delivery, now you may be thinking how can students buy online when they are as skint as they say? Well i still needed to buy things, birthdays, Christmas, general things we needed, things are often found cheaper online!

You can even get discounts on your shopping, I used to shop faithfully in Iceland! there is nothing like a shop full of processed chicken!! However if you live in a house with 6 people in then you can all club together to do your shopping online, search for a Tesco’s voucher code, i say group together because most of the time it might be an offer that activates when you spend £50 or more.

Either way education is a hard and costly process however there are ways and means to chip at the edges and make the journey a little bit easier, It may be hard and full of sob stories but university is the best time you will ever have.

Tags: Discount Vouchers

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In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, Shadow Children’s Secretary, Michael Gove, confirmed that the Tories are in talks with foreign educational groups, and said that should the Conservatives win the next election, they intend to set up similarly run state schools in England.

At present, our school system is very much focused on the 3 R’s, and little variation from this is actually allowed. The ideas in discussion are aimed at developing the child’s “self” as well as their ability.

The Hawn Foundation, ran by US actress Goldie Hawn, “teaches the Buddhist technique of Mindfulness training, which emphasises social and emotional progress over academic testing and the use of simple breathing exercises to boost learning power”.

The Tories seem keen to implement this style of teaching should they be voted in at the next election.

Montessori schools put a child’s sense of independence and decision-making ability  at the centre of their daily lessons (placing these skills above their knowledge/education).
The Steiner school curriculum was designed by the Austrian Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), and incorporates words such as holistic, spiritual and social when describing how it differs from mainstream education. But in practice it’s an extremely structured curriculum, designed to improve children’s concentration and get them physically and emotionally ready to learn.

Overall, this sounds like an exciting prospect; to enable children to think clearly and decide for themselves and to be able to motivate themselves into implementing their ideas. These skill appears far more transferable for a workplace than the ability to multiply, subtract and understand Dickens hidden meaning.

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I have been looking into booking our first family holiday abroad – it is a very exciting time! The children are now 12 and 14 (so they are both in secondary school), and are very excited to be going somewhere outside of the UK – and hoping to put some of their newly acquired language skills into good use.

The main problem I have come across is the sheer expense – flights and accommodation packages during school holidays are astronomically more expensive. So, I’ve looked at taking them out of school for a week – and found that if I do, I will have a fine to pay per child! However, the cost of the fine, compared to the saving is nothing, and so I will be taking them out of school to go on holiday.

I am worried that the classes they miss will be important, however, I will ensure that they are up to date and even ahead in their homework before we go, and have organised catch up homework for them to do once they are back. I think this is the best solution all around.

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Once up on a time, to cheat in a school exam would mean peering closely over your friend’s shoulder to see what they were writing, and hoping Mr. Smith wouldn’t notice.
In this day and age, a small device in your pocket, or even your ear, can provide you with all of the answers, with none of that risky stretching. And Ofqual, the regulator of qualifications, examinations and assessments in England, says that this type of cheating is on the up.

Searching online for devices to “aid” exam performance, finds numerous sites offering gadgets to get you the information discreetly, and in this growing business, the schools and exam boards are having to play catch up, and quickly. Ways to jam or block signals have been trialed and some dismissed, with other ideas still awaiting approval.

But in a country where university entrance is becoming harder to get, is it fair that a small percentage of entrants are there on the basis of others work? And how should this be tackled if it later comes to light that they did not truly earn their place or grades?

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Recent reports suggest that more and more of England’s poorest youngsters are now going to university. This is good news but in stark contrast the entrants from wealthy backgrounds are three times more likely to win a place. The numbers are up by 30% of those from poor area going to university then they were 5 years ago. Ministers are saying this is ‘record investment’ but there’s still a big gap as only a fifth of the poorest youngsters are at university compared to 57% from richer backgrounds. The study did also find that the gap between the rich and poor had widened by one percent since 1994.

Tags: University Entrants

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One of the most popular social networking site facebook has been inundated with an online protest as thousands of teenagers launch a attack about a Biology A-level exam paper that they claim to be unfair.
In the latest uproar another protest is raising concerns about a OCR A-Level biology taken on Monday. More than 3000 students have sent angry messages to a group on facebook. AQA is the exam board who devised the paper have responded by saying that they will take the worries being expressed by the students into consideration when marking and awarding grades. It seems that the paper was devised against a new curricular plan of study hence the confusion on the actual marking that will be awarded.

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Over the last decade the government set up a programme called Sure Start Children’s centres aimed at reaching disadvantaged families but a recent government watchdog has found that this target is still being missed and the centres are struggling to help where it’s needed most. Ministers have agreed to spend a extra £79m a year on hiring outreach workers as a fewer than a third of centres provided a one stop range of services for preschool children and their families. The centres which have benefited from the funding also lacked general management as basic data on expenditure and work couldn’t be provided – clearly highlighting a case of improving cost effectiveness being needed.

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In a storm hitting politics about education as the results of GCSE and A-Level League tables are published – Liberal Democrats have claimed that Labour has neglected hundreds of thousands of students in towns across England whilst ploughing money into schools in inner cities. The table show that state schools in the inner city neighbourhoods of cities such as London have shown dramatic progress whereas overall fewer than 50% of students achieved 5 good GCSE’s. however the other side of the coin revealed that only 1 in 13 secondary schools failed to meet the benchmark of 30% of pupils achieving 5 A* to C grades at GCSE including English and Maths.

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