The National Education Union general secretary speaks to Ben Chacko on growing calls to protect children from a toxic online culture
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TUC Congress 2015: Schools can make a difference
While addressing poverty and its causes must be top priority, teachers can help in tackling educational inequality in the classroom, argues LARRY FLANAGAN
While Iranians take to the streets en masse to protest sky-high inflation, Trump and Netanyahu are threatening military intervention. The Iranian population is trapped between a repressive regime, a suffocating economic war from the outside, and a history of dark alliances, argues MARC VANDEPITTE
Unison Scotland’s BRENDA AITCHISON says her union won’t tolerate further cuts to public services
The Danish Communist Party’s Lotte Rortoft-Madsen assesses the fallout from US threats to annex the huge Arctic island
Trump threatens war and punitive tariffs to recapture Iranian resources – just as in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh and US corporations immediately seized 40% of the oil, says SEVIM DAGDELEN
Once derided by Farage as a ‘fraud,’ Jenrick has defected to Reform, bringing experience and political ruthlessness to the populist right — and raising the unsettling prospect of a Farage-led movement with a seasoned operative pulling the strings, says ANDREW MURRAY
SCHOOLS cannot eradicate the poverty which exists in our society. Nor can they fully mitigate the impact that poverty has on our young people.
Those in public life who seek to highlight the inequalities created by poverty would do well to understand that if we wish to end the negative impact of poverty on school attainment, we need to address the existence of poverty itself.
Having said that, however, we should recognise that schools and teachers can and do make a difference in the lives of individuals, of groups of children, and even on whole cohorts, which is why the daily interaction in our classrooms is so important and indeed powerful.
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