Breathless with excitement - well, just breathless - the Diary brings you the ultimate educational title. It is “The General Teaching Council for EnglandDepartment for Education and Skills’ Local Education Authority Continuing Professional Development Partnership Project.” Punchy, huh? The National Foundation for Educational Research has just published an independent evaluation of this worthy work. Its report shortens the thing to GTC-DfES-LEA CPD Partnership Project but we think that’s half-hearted.
Partnership project should surely be shortened to PP and the whole thing set to a catchy tune.
Attentive readers of the Diary will know that such creatures are not really acronyms but initialisms. An acronym has to make a word.
Fortunately, we can bring you a new one of those too, thanks to Anglia polytechnic university’s decision to change its name to Anglia Ruskin. It wants to shake off that nasty polytechnic image and sound both arty and “work-relevant”, like its founding father, Victorian artist John Ruskin.
But students at Anglia Ruskin’s school of education have written to complain that the new name exposes their seat of learning to ridicule. “Add the acronym of a catchphrase like Home of Learning Excellence” on the end and you can see our dilemma,” they cry.
