It is mental health awareness week so – quite rightly – your newsfeeds will be full of articles about mental health. At HEPI we’ve written about these issues at length before. But that is not what this blog is about. More...

One of the challenges of policy making is that issues are sometimes defined in stereotypes. This is particularly true of university education. Television programmes such as Fresh Meat have portrayed students as living in self-imposed squalor. Poor housing conditions are seen as a rite of passage, rather than the result of an unforgiving housing market. More...

Journalists’ headlines are fair game of course, and always have been, but sometimes you wince a bit more than usual, and reading of independent schools’ ‘woe’ about more state school pupils getting into Oxbridge was a bit much. Writing in this Saturday’s Times, an education correspondent was keen to keep alive the demon of sector divide, and depict us as hand-wringing, beleaguered Heads, seeing our pupils are a threatened species. More...

When the history of the world is written in 1,000 years’ time, Friday 10th May 2019 will be identified as a landmark date. For it was an event that happened on that day that enabled that history to be written: had that event not happened, human life would have long since become extinct. More...

Private school leaders and sector authorities are sometimes more informative and thought-provoking when talking mainly to themselves – as in this interesting, eclectic collection of essays – than when addressing the rest of us in defensive and propaganda mode, or when preaching to the wider world about how children should be educated. More...