Edducan - get the career you want.

Hey gang, what do you call someone who has their photo not once but twice in the most downloaded app in the world? An M list celebrity. That’s right, I’ve upgraded my status from thoroughly unknown to slightly less than thoroughly unknown. Which is sort of like the perineum of fame. Why is fame important you ask? It isn’t. At all, but if through mutual using I can proselytize my message of taking…

Should Harry and Meghan move to Canada?

A subject I had literally no opinion on at all until I was asked and then I had strongly held views. Not because I care deeply where they live but because the idea of co-schooling seems absurd. So, knowing that other people also feel strongly about things that don’t in anyway affect them I wrote the following. Please enjoy the close up picture of my face…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/art…

Sorry I just popped out.

Oh, hi there, apologies for the prolonged absence. I was doing other things, lots of important worthy things that are too many to mention here. However I did take a moment to imbue the soundwaves of East Anglia with my warm brown tones. Talking to Chrissie Jackson on BBC Norfolk all about the rise of university promotion in spite of often worse outcomes. If you would like to listen to it, and I…

I wrote this last year and re-reading it this morning it’s hard not to feel a little sad that it’s perhaps more true now than it was then.

On the anniversary of September 11 it’s hard not to feel the creeping spectre of fear that jangles the nerves and gives rise to hundreds of ‘there but for…’ stories. Everyone of my generation knows where they were, the memory remains a grotesque imprint of…

GCSE Results Day 2019 - Success isn't final; failure isn't fatal - so says Churchill, great PM, terrible 1st Lord of the Admiralty. Take heart no matter what happens today...

So, a better man or at the very least more accomplished blogger might try and pull the wool over your eyes and retool previous posts claiming them as new. Not I though, no, no let honesty be my watchword as I promise faithfully that I was simply too absorbed in other projects to create or curate (that’s what people say about things nowadays isn’t it?) an entirely new blog post for today’s event.

A Level Results Day – For what are we are about to receive may UCAS make us truly fearful…

Or not. Actually it seems that this year things are going pretty well for many, but for those of you haven’t quite got what you wanted then please check out my article about next steps. It is on the Daily Mail but I wrote it so it’s all good.

Also take a moment to check out the comments section, riddled as it is with the kind of lack of irony and self awareness one has come to expect from…

Summer loving happened so fast, too many British live in the past…

Ahhh, summer, the warm hazy nights segue into yellow weather warnings, coastal collapse and wide spread flooding. What could be more gloriously British than appalling weather throughout the summer period barring the few days set aside every year where it’s hot enough for the Sun newspaper to run the headline, ‘Phwoar, what a scorcher!’? This is not however about bemoaning the base wit of the…

Keep on rocking in the Free School…

So, a lengthier and more explanatory post will be forthcoming soon enough but those little scamps at my local paper beat me to the punch. After years of moaning I decided it was time to put up or shut up, whilst I have no especial faith in my putting up abilities I have even less in my shutting up ones. So, it has come to this – a colleague and I (he much wiser than me) have decided to go for it…

‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees bring Mickey’s good name into disrepute (Students sues uni for £60,000 and wins – kind of.)

Anglia Ruskin University has been instructed to pay £61,000 in compensation to student Pok Wong, essentially for being shit. Although to be fair £46,000 of it was for legal fees, so the court estimates only about fifteen grand’s worth of shitness. And there go the floodgates – there’s now a dangerous but justified precedent for universities having to do more than offer pie crust promises in…

When it rains, it pours - National Careers Week articles... In actual proper papers and journals...

As per the title, yesterday turned out to be a fecund period of, well, I won’t say journalism, because… you know. BUT. I did manage to get two articles published, one in the Femail section, all about what parents can do to help their kids find their career path and one in the TES, all about the wonderful National Careers Week, and why every week should in a sense be National Careers Week. Anyway…

Trade your passion for glory.

Oh hi there everyone, long time, little in the way of articles. You know how it is… anyway in amongst all the other noise and clamour I did manage to dash out this effort for Femail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6688007/From-apprenticeships-gap-years-careers-expert-reveals-paths-teenager-take.html

No, no – you’re welcome. Enjoy it…

Last day to titivate your UCAS.

Here it is, the final push, one day left ’til A day, the largely unknown abbreviation I’ve conjured up for Application Day. January 15th, pencils down, step away from the desk and various other Masterchef inspired cliched expressions about how the time is now to fluff, primp and polish your personal statement. Even little tweaks can be the difference between glory and disappointment. So take a…

Top tips for your UCAS personal statement.

As Christmas looms, the holidays broaching the horizon there may be a vague sense that you can put your beslippered feet up and enjoy all the promise of the festive season. But. Whilst visions of candy canes may dance in your head and clatters be arising it is also the time of year when many of you will be turning your attention to your UCAS personal statement.

So, before you get too snug and…

Well I never. Wellbeing rising.

As well as being a horrendous armchair know it all when it comes to career, university and work preparedness I’ve also been paying attention to other things education. So much so that I got involved with the TalkHealth Partnership earlier in the year and started writing some blogs about mental wellbeing in students and the looming crisis in mental health amongst students and teenagers. 

The…

Top tips for preparing for the Oxbridge interviews.

It is fast approaching ‘that time of year’ – not Christmas although yes, Christmas of course – gone is the humdrum spookiness of Halloween only to be replaced instantaneously by a cornucopia of tinsel festooned supermarkets, each gaudier than the last and insisting on a live countdown until the damp squib of the day itself. BUT. For others, ‘that time of year’ means something very different. If…

Fly me to the moon. Or how science got sexy.

From the moment our forbears first picked up flint and struck fire or constructed a makeshift axe we have been a people of tool users. More than that we have sought out and refined tools that make things easier. It perhaps wouldn’t be unkind to suggest that the entirety of humanity’s progress has been driven by an overweening desire to do as little as possible. The car, the remote control, the…