Education secretary asks UK watchdog to look into nursery practices, including non-refundable deposits and add-ons

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, is ordering a competition review of hidden childcare charges amid concerns parents are being hit with extra charges, despite the government’s flagship expansion of funded childcare hours.

Phillipson has written to the Competition and...

As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move

Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.

It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the...

Risk of CTE in men’s sports has been widely studied, but female brains are softer and more vulnerable

Cleo Pallister-Turley, a back for Cardiff university’s women’s rugby team, winces as she recalls two major concussions from playing rugby. “Girls ask me, ‘aren’t you worried about getting injured?’,” the biomedical sciences student said. “I enjoy the physicality and the...

Growing backlash among European staff against radical cuts to pay off Covid-era debt, with some accusing council of ‘colonial attitude’

The historic Palacete building at 31 Paseo del General Martínez Campos in Madrid’s upmarket Chamberí district has been home to the British Council in Spain for about 70 years.

About 5,000 students each year pass through its 35 classrooms, learning English,...

New scheme will be worth 40% less than current government grants and will be shared with secondaries

Funding for primary school sport in England is to be slashed by Labour, including the abolition of a grant designed to cement the 2012 Olympic legacy, to the dismay of school leaders.

The Department for Education said that the £320m fund paid directly to primary schools each year through its PE...

The NCA and NPCC say children should be blocked from accessing sites which do not stop them seeing nudes or being contacted by strangers.

Kentucky is one of about 1,200 school districts across the US that have each sued Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube

Meta agreed to settle a major lawsuit on Thursday with a school district in Kentucky over claims that its social networks are designed to be addictive, leading to harm in children. The settlement comes less than three weeks before the case was scheduled to go to trial in federal...

When pupils could no longer play outside, St John’s school in Barnet decided to act, enlisting Trees for Cities to help rethink its outside space

The play area at St John’s Church of England primary in Barnet, north London, used to flood so severely it was often unusable. “It would get so bad that the children couldn’t be dismissed from the playground,” says Macci Dobie, the school’s...

Apparently, nines are the hardest to grasp for primary school children. If only they’d learned how to cheat like me

Maths was never my thing. I quite enjoyed it at O-level, to the extent that I chose to do it at A-level. As early as the first week of the A-level course, however, it became abundantly clear that the subject was quite beyond me. I simply couldn’t make head or tail of what the...

Ban social media and reform education to tackle scandal of young people not in work or study, says Peter Hyman

Schools have become a “pipeline” to worklessness for a large cohort of young people in the UK, according to an influential former Labour adviser who has called for urgent action to help a “lost generation”.

Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Tony Blair and Keir Starmer, told the Guardian...

The education secretary defends videos starring The Only Way Is Essex star promoting post-16 education.

Soft power institution faces funding crisis linked to Covid-era government loan due to be repaid by September

Staff at the British Council in Italy will go on strike over deep cuts that would slash about 80% of its workforce due to a funding crisis facing the organisation.

Out of 130 of its teaching staff across Rome, Milan and Naples, 108 are being targeted as teaching activities in Italy face...

Mandatory cap on top grades at one of America’s most prestigious colleges will go into effect in fall of 2027

Harvard faculty has voted to impose a roughly 20% cap on A grades in an effort to curb decades of grade inflation that, the faculty argues, degrades the value of top-tier academic achievement at the college.

The mandatory cap on top grades at one of America’s most prestigious colleges...

Union says emphasis on academic goals conflicts with proposed measures on special educational needs provision

Changes to special educational needs provision in England could be thwarted by “academic attainment at all costs” policies that prioritise exam results and punish inclusive schools, headteachers have said in response to a government consultation.

The Association of School and College...

Frank Cottrell-Boyce tells MPs to focus on early-years reading, with more support for parents and nursery workers

The children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged the government to prioritise pleasure over learning in children’s reading.

Giving evidence to MPs on the education committee, which is investigating the crisis in reading for pleasure among children, the screenwriter and...

Holding a flashcard for chemistry or further maths fills me with a unique kind of horror. Does anyone really understand this?

There’s a chart doing the rounds on social media, ranking philosophers by how punk they are. Hobbes and Heidegger, it says, are “basically a cop”; while for Dionysus the Renegade, Marx and Parmenide, it declares: “They’re not punk, punk is them.” I have no...

Tracker of attitudes towards artificial intelligence also finds almost half of the public would prefer to avoid it

One in three university students think AI will wipe out jobs so rapidly it will trigger civil unrest, according to a survey by King’s College London (KCL).

Students are among the heaviest users of AI, the poll found, with 77% using it at least a few times a month – compared with...

Galleries such as National Museum Cardiff pull in children with their play areas and pencils – but stick around and you’ll notice kids critiquing Turner paintings too

Neil Osborne and his three-year-old daughter Daisy are peering at a small, shimmering painting by JMW Turner of foaming waves crashing against a cliff. It’s their second visit to the National Museum Cardiff (NMC). Daisy loves...

Exclusive: Families of men facing death penalty add to internal opposition to seeking deal with Saudi defence ministry

The families of two scholars facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia have appealed to the University of Cambridge to drop proposals to run staff training courses for Riyadh’s defence ministry.

The Guardian revealed last week that Cambridge’s Judge business school has been...

Businesses are advised against paying – but as the Canvas platform hack shows, many are prepared to deal to protect users’ privacy

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After a week of outages, hundreds of millions of students’ data stolen, delayed assignment due dates, and school login pages being defaced by hackers, US tech firm Instructure – which operates the...

Cannes film festival: Marine Atlan’s debut film follows a group of French high-school kids and their long-suffering teacher on a visit to Pompeii and Naples

Here is cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s beautiful debut film about young love, superbly acted and directed. It is a reminder of how fundamentally dishonest and pseudosophisticated it is to laugh dismissively at the...