ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Influencer Degrees, French School Riots and Careers for Four-Year-Olds. That's the ground Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs cover on Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, the digital platform bringing outstanding practice and ideas to a global audience.
Would you let your child study social media influencing? Nottingham Trent University has launched a three-year BA in content creation and the headlines didn't hold back. John, who once taught A level communication studies, says the label misleads. Underneath sits marketing, business and technology, and he'd back a vocational degree that speaks to young people. His sharper target is British snobbery. Anything with "studies" on the front draws pearl-clutching, and the real scandal for John is students paying top fees for crowded lecture halls and workbooks. Paul wonders whether a degree built on today's platforms will age well, recalling an IT qualification that dated within years. Teachers are influencers too, John reminds him, and not always for the better. Paul counters that teachers at least work under regulation, inspection and line management, so perhaps Nottingham Trent is quietly bringing ethics to the wild west of online media.
Then to France, where pupils are protesting over overcrowded classes, staff shortages and unfit school buildings. Paul reports 1,949 arrests and more than 3,700 schools blockaded. John sets the unrest beside the 2011 riots in Britain and senses an older anger finding a target, while Paul reaches for the psychotherapist's language of repression and projection. John recalls a friend who joined the 1968 student sit-ins in London, then travelled to Northern Ireland to back the civil rights marchers and was beaten for it. Paul also brings in Impossible City and the French tradition of the manifestation as a rite of passage. John's verdict on the young protesters is clear. "I think there's nothing wrong with being young and led by your heart." Schools that treat children as problems to be managed, he argues, deserve the anger. What should a UK system learn from it? Listen to young people, and build schools of joy, creativity and challenge rather than filters.
The last story asks what education is for. Former minister Alan Milburn wants four-year-olds introduced to future careers and compulsory work placements for 14 to 16 year olds. John loves the idea of a postman visiting the classroom but rejects any suggestion that primary school exists to produce future workers, recalling a visit from a policeman with handcuffs and a whistle. He predicts two kinds of work experience, one built on discipline for some pupils and one on opportunity and choice for others, and he doubts a postman ever visits Eton College. Paul, a firm believer in placements, argues they change a child's self-concept and bring a maturity no week in school can match. John concedes the point. Along the way they ask why every social problem lands on schools and whether Westminster thinks education can be mobilised like an army. For anyone working in teacher education, school leadership, curriculum design or careers guidance, it's a conversation with real bite.
Then the bananas. Paul tells of a Danish soldier in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 who received a paper outline of his newborn daughter's hand, and reflects that "love finds a way around many things, including distance and war". John offers the word palimpsest, an old text scrubbed out and written over yet still showing through, and finds it all along the high street if you look above the shopfronts, as he did on a walk across London with his daughter.
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