Peter Wilby

Steven Mantilla/The Times-News via AP One child wrote of a suicide bomber; another of the 'sweet honey mangoes' of home. Kate Clanchy, tall, fast-talking and slightly intimidating, lays out more than a score of slim books on the kitchen table in her Oxfordhome. They are collections of poetry written by children she taught, published with the help of grants that she tirelessly raised.

"The Oldie is an incredible magazine - perhaps the best magazine in the world right now" Graydon Carter, founder of Air Mail and former Editor of Vanity Fair Subscribe to the Oldie and get a free cartoon book Subscribe Blog | By Peter Wilby | Feb 28, 2024 My parents had never been out of England – and when I say England, I mean England. We lived in Leicester and, as the kind mother of a Kent-bred university friend later said to me, the Continent would have seemed dauntingly far away.

Education now has its own World Cup, albeit at three-yearly intervals, rather than the four years favoured by most major sports. The results of the latest contest held in 2009 - the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) - have just been announced to the usual political and media excitement. And it is not only in Britain that results are awaited and analysed with anxious attention.