Be a record breaker with Jamie Oliver

Just one week remains to sign up to join Jamie Oliver and TES in an attempt to hold the world’s largest ever live cookery lesson. Designed for pupils aged 9-13, the lesson will be streamed through the TES Connect website on Friday 16 May at 2pm. Oliver will be preparing a healthy rainbow wrap, and students can participate in a normal classroom. The lesson is the centrepiece of Food Revolution Day, run by the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation to campaign for healthy eating. To register to take part and to download an ingredients list, a lesson plan and a recipe, visit www.tesconnect.comjamieoliver

Postgrads enticed into teaching by pound;40k `chairs’

A scheme to recruit post-doctoral graduates as schoolteachers will be partly funded by private businesses. Firms including Barclays and GlaxoSmithKline are sponsoring the initiative, which aims to encourage people with PhDs to become science and maths teachers. The new recruits will be known as “maths and physics chairs” and will receive a starting salary of pound;40,000, compared with the basic teacher’s starting salary of pound;21,804-pound;27,270. The firms will contribute towards the additional pay and training costs.

`Diverse’ A-level covers Russell Brand and tweets

Students taking a new A-level could study an interview with rapper Dizzee Rascal, tweets by journalist Caitlin Moran and Russell Brand’s evidence to Parliament on drugs policy. The English language and literature course would also include more conventional texts such as the poems of Emily Dickinson and William Blake, and works by William Shakespeare and George Orwell. Exam board OCR is billing the new qualification - planned as one of the government’s “more rigorous” exams - as “the most diverse yet for any English A-level”.

Lack of textbooks violates rights in South Africa

The rights of thousands of South African children have been violated by education authorities that failed to supply them with the required textbooks, according to the country’s High Court. Almost 40 schools in Limpopo province are still waiting for textbooks four months after the start of the school year, it has emerged. Officials have promised that the books will arrive next month, but some teachers have resorted to borrowing books from neighbouring schools and asking pupils to copy out the text by hand.

US figures reveal teacher-student `diversity gap’

Fewer than one in five teachers in the US are non-white, despite more than half of pupils coming from ethnic minorities, new figures show. The statistics, which reveal that white pupils will make up less than half of the overall student body for the first time this year, have prompted fears of a “diversity gap” between students and teachers. Kevin Gilbert, coordinator of teacher leadership for Clinton Public School District in Mississippi, said many students would benefit from having positive role models in the form of teachers from their own ethnic group. “Nothing can help motivate our students more than to see success standing right in front of them,” he added.

Discover politicians’ priorities at TES partner event

The Policy Exchange thinktank is to host a conference considering which education policies will be top of the agenda in the next general election. TES will be a media partner for the event on 7 June, which will include keynote speeches from education secretary Michael Gove, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt and Lord Storey, Liberal Democrat spokesman for education in the House of Lords.