ISC Daily News Summary

The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times report that Brighton College has announced plans for a chain of replica campuses overseas. The school will open up to 12 schools after striking a deal with a property developer in the Middle East. The first two schools will be in Abu Dhabi, with plans to establish further branches as far afield as Mauritius, Oman, Jordan, Romania, Vietnam and India. Headmaster of Brighton College, Richard Cairns, is quoted.

Private school to open 'replicas' overseas (Daily Telegraph)
UK college plans series of satellite schools (Financial Times)

Sunday's Observer article on the increasing number of schoolboys are taking up dance lessons featured Bradfield College, where a scholarship pupil has led a 'dance revolution' at the school.

Huge rise in boys taking dance lessons (Observer)

Imperial College London has announced it will require A-level students to possess an A* in maths and two As in 'relevant subjects' for seven of its 16 undergraduate courses, including physics and mechanical engineering, when the grade is introduced next year.

Now Imperial College demands A* at A-level (Evening Standard)

Figures published by the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine reveal that university vice-chancellors took home an average salary of £193,000 in 2007/08, a 9% increase on the previous year. According to the figures, the higher education sector as a whole paid its university heads more than £30million.

Anger as university bosses claim £200,000 salaries (Daily Telegraph)
Vice-chancellors' salaries on a par with prime minister (Guardian)
Campus fury at vice-chancellors' windfalls (Times)
University chiefs paid as much as PM (Independent not online)
Bottom of the class, Mr Lammy (Independent)
Pay packets of excellence (Times Higher Education)
University heads win 9% pay rise as they call for student fees to double (Daily Mail)

An investigation into the marking of Sats by the Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has found that in English writing tests taken at aged 14, 44% of grades awarded were wrong. The investigation has also uncovered that some teachers coach their 11-year-old pupils inside the exam hall to give the right answers during tests. Figures from the QCA also show that almost 4,000 students were caught cheating in GCSE and A-level exams last summer.

Up to half the grades on Sats papers were wrong, says review (Guardian)
Up to one third of schoolchildren given wrong marks in Sats exams (Daily Telegraph)
Thousands of students cheating in exams (Daily Telegraph)
60,000 pupils get wrong exam grades in marking fiasco (Times)
Teachers becoming the worst cheaters in school exams (Independent)
One in three children are given wrong grade for SATs every year (Daily Mail)
Surge in exam disqualifications as cheating pupils are caught red-handed (Daily Mail)
150,000 Sats re-marked after fiasco (Daily Mirror)
'Concern' over English Sats test (BBC News Online)

The Guardian reports that Children's Secretary Ed Balls is seeking a new legal power to dictate the basic content of every public exam in England, in a move that would give him or any future secretary of state the right to decide which books children must study at GCSE or A-level.

Ed Balls seeks power to dictate what textbooks GCSE and A-level students must study (Guardian)

Comment piece in the Daily Telegraph on single-sex education following a Good Schools Guide analysis which suggests that those in all-female state schools make better progress than those who attend mixed secondaries.

Girls's schools: good for your grades, terrible for your mental health (Daily Telegraph)

A school dinner lady is claiming damages from a teenager who seriously injured her while playing tag with a friend. If she is successful, pupils could become legally liable for boisterous behaviour that results in accidents.

Dinner lady sues boy who broke her nose (Times)
Dinner lady injured by running schoolboy seeks damages in 'cotton wool culture' case (Daily Telegraph)
Dinner lady sues boy, 13, for hundreds of thousands of pounds after he ran into her while playing 'tag' (Daily Mail)

The 11-plus divide (Daily Telegraph letters)
Lifetime of graduate debt (Daily Telegraph letters)
Building university elites from the bottom up (Times letters)

Today's Independent Education supplement includes articles on school assemblies and faith, academic self-government at Oxford and Cambridge, funding for art colleges and gap years.

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This is my last day at ISC and my final Daily News Summary. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their fantastic feedback I have received for the summary during my 20 months in the job. I wish all ISC schools the very best for the future, and hope that you continue to enjoy the Daily News Summary as much as I have enjoyed putting it together each morning.