Event Reports

Summaries of some of the Festival highlights

At this year's Festival, we brought in a team of nine student reporters from the Masters course in journalism at City University and asked them to write short reports on some of the talks and panel discussions. Below are links to these as PDFs.

Thanks to our student reporters who worked extremely hard all weekend:  Laura Cox, Frankie Holloway, Ollie Nieburg, Shy Satkunanandan, Jack Serle, Holly Welham, Helena Williams, Catherine Wylie and Lottie Young.

Keynotes

• Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education
• Andy Burnham MP, Shadow Secretary Of State For Education
• Sir Martin Rees with Dr Anthony Seldon
• Lord Robert Winston

Panel discussions

• First choice or last resort: why is vocational still seen as second-best? - Asha Khemka, Janet Murray, Mike Morris, Nat Debney-Davie & Ty Goddard (Chair)
• New business models in higher education - Terence Kealey, Chris Brady, Jenny Birch, Mark Jeynes & Hamish McRae (Chair)
• Overexamined and undereducated - Andrew Hall, Mark Dawe, Andrew Atkinson & John Abbott (Chair)
• Philosophers on philosophy in schools - Terence Kealey, Angie Hobbs, Emma Williams, Julian Baggini & Pete Worley
• Raising aspirations in young people - David Lammy, Tony Sewell, Katharine Birbalsingh, Rachel Carr, Liz Sidwell, David Walker & Lucy Heller (Chair)
• Saving school science - Robert Winston, Nihal Hoque, David Porter and Alom Shaha
• Sex, drugs and education - Brenda Almond, Helen Wright, Larry Culliford and Camilla Long (Chair)
• Should we be teaching wellbeing? - Frank Furedi, Lord Richard Layard and Eleanor Mills (Chair)
• The business of education - Graham Able, Jenny Birch, Hugh Harper, John Elledge
• The future of universities - Aaron Porter, Terence Kealy & Hamish Mcrae (Chair)
• Who is the 21st century music teacher? - Sue Hallam, Rob Kitchen and Katherine Zeserson

Talks

• A School Inspector Calls - Gervase Phinn
• Chemistry In The Classroom - David Phillips
• How The World's Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better - Michael Barber
• Increasing The Size Of The 'Stem' Cohort In Higher Education - Dame Athene Donald
• Lessons from a broken generation - David Starkey
• My struggle with dyslexia - Scott Quinnell
• Neuroscience and education, a no-brainer - Colin Blakemore
• Re-Inventing Education: How Music, Philosophy And Embodied Learning Could Save The World - Katherine Zeserson
• Tradition is the best innovation – Katharine Birbalsingh
• Who Is Failing Our Kids? - John D’Abbro