International Schools Blog

On 1 April 2021, the Department for Education in England released updated essential core criteria that DfE-validated systematic synthetic phonics (SPP) programmes must adhere to and announced that they were launching a validation process closing in March 2022.

A second year of disruption to examinations has brought to centre-stage questions of how and why we assess, and of the balance of assessment, teaching and learning.

Have you heard the phrase ‘growth mindset’? It is the belief that we all have the ability to learn and improve. It was coined by Dr Carol Dweck, an American psychologist who was interested in student attitudes towards failure.

Novels, short stories, poems and plays offer readers an unique opportunity. Literature provides a new perspective on the world, an understanding of experiences very different from your own, and an insight into different environments and cultures through the writings of authors past and present.

With the pandemic largely preventing on-campus education across the world over the past 18 months, educators have had to significantly rethink how to continue to teach students and work with parents when the normal approaches just aren’t possible.

The global market for robotics is expanding continuously. In this article, Nicoletta Beretta shares insights into the impact this will have on global industry.

Before the advent of the internet, we knew where to find information: television, newspapers and libraries. But now, with a limitless world of information at our fingertips, the challenge is how to tell which information is trustworthy – and which isn’t.

In July 1944, after two years in claustrophobic hiding from her Nazi persecutors, the 15-year-old Anne Frank wrote, ‘When I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better… In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realize them!’ Following the D-Day landings the previous month, her hopes were soaring that the Netherlands would soon be liberated. Anne was already planning her life beyond the hiding place, when she would ‘go out into the world and make a difference’. 

In a post-pandemic world, many of the things we would have only ever considered doing in-person, we now do without thinking online. We are all now so much more open to a combined online/in-person approach to practically every aspect of our lives that it has become normal to us, and the education environment is no exception.

After global school shutdowns, learning loss has become a significant problem for students everywhere. According to the majority of teachers in a McKinsey survey on lost learning, school closures have led to students being up to six months behind where they would usually be in terms of learning.