Computering not separate subject
- Computer studies is a service subject rather than a separate discipline, finds the second Bellis report. It says the study of the computer should belong, in varying degrees, to most school subjects. Specialist computer work should mostly be left to further or higher education. A questionnaire showed 242 schools had access to computers. About 20,000 pupils are doing computer studies this session.
Edinburgh parents on warpath
- In a month, Edinburgh’s education committee will decide on the form that non-selective reorganisation takes. Meetings with parents began at the Royal High School, arguably the toughest nut to crack in ending selectivity. They concluded this week at Portobello, the other end of the spectrum of problems. The Royal High is tradition-laden and select: Portobello, the city’s first comprehensive, is saturated with pupils, well over 2,000 boys and girls to the Royal High’s 750 boys.
`Fascist’ approach to vandals condemned
- A clear division in local authorities’ attitudes to vandalism emerged at a London conference, when a councillor who said “do-gooders” had had their way for too long was accused of a “fascist” approach. The hardliner was Bromley’s Mr Kenneth Crask, whose borough has set up its own 12-man uniformed force - to be expanded to 30 - equipped with vans and two-way radios and led by a former police superintendent.
References should be generous
- Careers conventions are best when run by pupils, Mr A.W. Dawson, chief of engineering training to Parsons Peebles, told the Headteachers’ Association of Scotland. At one convention he had not seen one teacher all evening. School references, he added, should be generous without making out a second-rate goose to be a first-rate or even a second-rate swan.
Report warns of `white bias’ in IQ tests
- When IQ scores are the sole criterion for mental retardation, as many as 91 per cent of black children and 60 per cent of Mexican-American children are mislabelled, says a California study. Using a sample of over 7,000 children and adults, it shows that, among minorities, the children with highest IQs come from families sharing most characteristics with average white middle-class families.
