Category Students’ Perspectives
Schools of Tomorrow, a free “kick-off conference” Berlin, May 4-6 2017
One hundred years ago, educational reformers across the globe strove to create the foundation for new methods of learning and teaching. Industrialization, worldwide migration and urbanization led to profound upheavals, to which progressive educational reformers responded with new school concepts. In his groundbreaking 1915 publication “Schools of To-Morrow” the philosopher und educator John Dewey and […]
Schools should feel more like home: an interview with Lina Iordanaki
Lina Iordanaki is from Piraeus in Greece. Her first degree was in Primary Education and her master’s degree in Literature at the University of Athens. She is currently a 3rd-year PhD student in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her research areas include picturebooks, graphic novels, literacy and poetry for children. Her […]
Discipline and punish in a Pugin school: an interview with Anne Prendergast
Anne Prendergast has spent 30 years in media and publishing and is currently media director at Strattons: a bespoke advertising and design agency specialising in luxury travel, fashion and interior decorating. A graduate of Bristol University and the University of London she also is a new business consultant for Webpuzzle an innovative, digital content management […]
The importance of acoustics in learning: an interview with Shane Cryer, Ecophon
Shane Cryer manages the education sector in the UK and Ireland for Swedish acoustic experts, Ecophon. After a career in the construction industry, having studied building and property surveying, he now concentrates on building acoustics. Working closely with organisations such as The Institute of Acoustics (IOA) and the RIBA, Shane has been promoting the new […]
I started school twice: an interview with Bridget Murray, teacher
Bridget Murray attended primary schools in the late 1970s in Middlesborough, Hertfordshire and Basingstoke, Hampshire (UK) where she also went to secondary school. After a degree in Computer Science at Warwick University, Bridget took a PGCE at the Institute of Education and taught in primary schools in London and Kent. In the past five years […]
Allowing for easy interaction: an interview with Hedwig Heinsman, DUS architects, Amsterdam
Hedwig Heinsman is an architect who grew up in the Dutch Flevopolder and now lives and works in Amsterdam. One of the three co-founders of DUS architects, probably best known for their 3D Print Canal House, she is passionate about public and social architecture. Hedwig is a graduate of Delft Technical University and the […]
Interview with Sue Steggles, teacher.
Sue Steggles was a pupil at John Scurr primary school, Bethnal Green in the East End of London in the 1960s. After attending grammar school, she trained to be a nursery nurse. Subsequently, she retrained as a primary school teacher and taught at Curwen primary school in Plaistow, Essex, Old Ford Primary in Bow, London […]
Interview preview: with special school deputy head Pamela Murphy
Pamela Murphy read Geography at the University of Cambridge before working as a University administrator and then training as a primary teacher. She worked in a mainstream school as a class teacher before working in two special schools and she is currently the assistant head teacher of Queen Elizabeth II special school in London. Pupils at the school […]
Interview with Suvani Dave
Suvani Dave has attended independent primary and secondary schools in Ashford, Windsor and Hounslow. She is currently a student in the sixth form at Orleans Park secondary school in Twickenham, where she is taking ‘A’ levels in art, maths and psychology. She is considering studying architecture at university in the USA or the UK. Suvani […]
Wiping the slate clean: one way to declutter a primary school
When I asked Catherine Burke what she would wish for if she could change just one thing in all schools, this is how she replied: (T)o remove everything from schools including all the clutter and all the paraphernalia and all the technology and all the stuff and then have a really good think about what […]
The phantom cloakroom
When I was considering whether to include my own childhood school as one of a series of research visits to primary schools, I wondered how that might affect the research. It wasn’t until after I’d made the visit that I remembered Katie Jones & Jon Anderson’s excellent (2009) paper about the methodologies of different research […]
Interview with Judith Baines
Judith Baines was born in 1933 and is a former primary school teacher and Deputy Head. She pioneered progressive teaching methods at Eynsham Primary in Oxfordshire with her husband George Baines from the late 1960s until the 1980s. Judith and George then worked at Bishop Grossteste College, Lincoln, a teacher training college, before their retirement […]
Interview with Ruth Benn and Rebecca Skelton, teachers at Sparrow Farm Infants & Nursery school, Feltham.
Ruth Benn and Rebecca Skelton teach at Sparrow Farm Infants & Nursery school in Feltham, close to Heathrow Airport. Rebecca began working at the school in September 2013, after completing a PGCE in Primary Education while Ruth joined the school a year later after finishing her BA in Education. They both work in the Year […]
Interview with Georgie Hughes, Reading Recovery Teacher Leader, Tower Hamlets
Georgina (Georgie) Hughes is the Reading Recovery teacher leader for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and also trains teachers in Reading Recovery for other London boroughs. Georgie is based at the two-form entry Osmani Primary School in Whitechapel, East London, where she is the Inclusion Manager. Osmani’s intake of children is primarily of Bangladeshi heritage, with seventy […]
Interview with Rima Tarar, architecture student
Rima Tarar was born in Paris in the early 1990s, where she attended nursery and primary school. One year into her secondary education, with very little English, she moved to London and was enrolled in a state secondary school in Hackney. Rima is currently studying interior architecture at London Metropolitan University and considering a number […]
Interview with Nicky Manby, Chair of Governors, Pakeman Primary, London
Nicky Manby first became involved with Pakeman Primary, a North London state primary school, as a reading volunteer after a career as a French and German teacher. The teaching and sharing of reading with children has been a significant part of her life and she believes that without good reading schools, children are held back […]
Interview with Ji Yu (Summer)
Ji Yu, who likes to be known as Summer at the University of Cambridge where she is a doctoral student in Education, is investigating the impact of learning spaces upon student learning in higher education. She is exploring this topic with a comparative (mixed methods) case study in China. Summer grew up in Zixi, […]
Interview with Dr Catherine Burke
Dr Catherine Burke is a well-known historian of childhood, education and school design whose books include School (2008) and The School I’d Like (2003), both co-authored with Ian Grosvenor. Her latest book, A Life in Education and Architecture, is a study of architect Mary Beaumont Medd (2013). She reflected on her own experience of the materiality […]
