Miles Everitt, 18, thinks himself lucky to have been well supported by his school when he came out as transgender. Growing up female, he’d always preferred to wear boys’ clothes and play the male character in online games; at secondary school, after he cut his hair short, many teachers assumed he was a boy. It was seeing a trans character on Hollyoaks and then reading blogs by young trans people on Tumblr that made him realise he could be transgender. Three years ago he came out in a video he posted on Facebook. His mother’s response was to go into…
Author: Loknath Das
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It was a sight Lorna Jackson, a London headteacher, had never expected to see: two pupils at her primary school sleeping behind bins at the station with their parents. “Mum, dad and the two little children were all sleeping on a mattress they’d found. The family had been evicted and the children had very little to eat.” Jackson’s school, Maryland primary in Stratford, is in a deprived area of east London. As well as suffering homelessness, her pupils are regularly victims of domestic violence. “I realised that my role had changed. Unless I addressed our children’s wellbeing, their education was…
A woman from Collegeville, Montgomery County, is about to get a new lease on life, thanks to social media, a woman from Wisconsin, and her favorite boy band. This is the stuff you see in movies. You don’t expect it to happen to you. Now in the end stage of renal disease, Stefani Jones of Collegeville needs a kidney transplant. “Dialysis every day, ten different medicines,” What’s life like? Jones said, “It’s harder than it was before.” But Jones has beaten the odds, finding a match in Amy Prince of Wisconsin. The two once complete strangers found each yet through…
NBC has stepped in to save Brooklyn Nine-Nine after an outcry on social media over Fox’s decision to scrap the US police sitcom. The series, starring comedians Chelsea Peretti and Andy Samberg, has gained a cult following for its diverse cast and the way it addresses issues of discrimination in the New York Police Department. When it emerged that Fox would not be renewing the series, fans pleaded with other networks to pick up the show. Using the SaveB99 hashtag, they posted gifs and clips from the show on Twitter and Instagram and started a petition calling for the series to continue. The…
As National Charter Schools Week wraps up, new data show their potential to improve students’ scores. One thing nearly every expert in the field will tell you is that we have a long way to go before every student in America is getting a good education. The recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card, confirmed as much. The NAEP is administered to a sample of students in a variety of subjects from across the country every two years. Its latest math and reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders showed a general…
A trust that runs four primary schools spent thousands of pounds on overseas trips for its leaders, more than £1,000 on two hotel rooms for two nights and almost £10,000 on Facebook adverts for a free school that has not yet been set up, according to allegations in a draft investigation seen by the Observer. In a case that will raise further questions about the financial management of academies, an inquiry into Silver Birch Academy Trust claims it spent £6,117 on a fact-finding trip to China and New Zealand for its chief executive Patricia Davies, a former headteacher of the year,…
The United Nations joined the World Bank and four regional development banks on Friday to launch a plan to boost funding for education by $10 billion as new data shows a growing gap over access to schools. About 260 million children worldwide are not in school, including 10 million who are refugees, according to an education commission set up in 2015 to boost investment in education. If this trend continues, half of the world’s children — 400 million — will have no education beyond the age of 11 by the year 2030, said former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who…
Remember sweating over your Klout score? Seven years ago, Klout arrived, and suddenly, there was a way to measure your social media influence across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and more with a simple score. Must read: How has Google dodged data privacy issue? It’s the ROI In 2011 and 2012, we were obsessed with Klout. If you had a high Klout score — 77 here at its high, which was nothing to sneeze at — life was great. If it was low, you felt blue, and you tried hard to get your score back up. When Klout hiccuped and dropped everyone’s social influence score to…
Protests over land or services – what researchers have dubbed “a rebellion of the poor” – usually enter mainstream media as a traffic problem. If the protest is significant, like the one in the Siqalo informal settlement in Mitchells Plain, it might enter the evening television news bulletins or the next day’s newspaper. Then it is usually reported as an orgy of violence with images of burning, looting and barricading. Until recently, mainstream media would have largely set the agenda for the public understanding of these events. One characteristic of such coverage was that the voices of poor people would…
Pre-internet, the extent to which we knew about each other was the extent to which we volunteered information about ourselves. We generally kept our business to ourselves, and we were happy in our ignorance. We had a work life and, at the end of a long day, we went home to a personal life. Today we’re exposed to abundant details about our friends and family, including hundreds or thousands of “friends” we don’t even know. It’s the largest personal soapbox the world has ever known and we welcome anyone who’ll listen. We snap selfies over breakfast, film ourselves feeding the dog and host…