Tag Archives: languages

LibLink: Paddy Ashdown: Learning six languages changed my life

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 17th October 2014 - 8:50 am

The Guardian is hosting an exhibition called “The Languages that changed my life” at its office in London. This interests me as I was both good at and fascinated by languages at school and I now have a teenager who almost obsessively studies language, learning Swahili, French and a bit of Mandarin Chinese for fun.

Paddy Ashdown has written a piece for the Guardian’s exhibition about how his language learning has enhanced his life. There are a couple of quite funny anecdotes. Just be thankful he didn’t make one of them at a diplomatic reception or there might have been an international incident:

Posted in News | Also tagged paddy ashdown and the guardian | 9 Comments

Opinion: Answers on no more than 2 sides of A4 (part 2)

By Alex Feakes | Thu 30th December 2010 - 12:05 pm

In my earlier article, I looked at the new proposals for dealing with school exclusions set out in The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper, published by the government last month. Two other areas of concern in Paper, which otherwise contains some good ideas, relates to the curriculum changes and the measurement of schools’ performance.

Curriculum – the broad academic core

The White Paper gives some welcome attention to the breadth of the curriculum students study. Although the freedoms proposed for schools elsewhere in the paper allow them to adopt their own route, it is proposed to encourage the …