Ellen Peirson-Hagger

5 days ago | observer.co.uk | Ellen Peirson-Hagger

A New New MeHelen OyeyemiFaber, £16.99, pp256Helen Oyeyemi’s eighth novel takes place over the course of a week. Its protagonist is Kinga, a 40-year-old living in Prague. Exactly what else is true about Kinga depends on which day of the week it is – for she isn’t just one character. She splits herself into seven iterations, each of whom has her own job (matchmaker, window cleaner, professional lounge-around-er), habits and acquaintances.

6 days ago | observer.co.uk | Ellen Peirson-Hagger

The American essayist on being a tortoise at the mayfly party, her love of nature and why she needs a librarian Rebecca Solnit, 63, is one of the world’s foremost writers on climate and feminism. Across more than 20 books – including Men Explain Things to Me (2014), and Orwell’s Roses (2021) – she has incisively and poetically explored activism, social change and the need for hope in troubled times.

1 week ago | tes.com | Ellen Peirson-Hagger

Learning to talk and understand words feels like “an impossible hurdle” for around 2 million children in the UK. And that number is 35 per cent higher than three years ago, according to new research by the organisation Speech and Language UK. Part of this increase can be seen in the well-documented rise in the number of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), with one-fifth of the school population now needing SEND support - a 31.2 per cent increase since 2016.

2 weeks ago | tes.com | Ellen Peirson-Hagger

“They’re taking the classroom.”James Gibson, executive headteacher at Becton School - a hospital school based within Sheffield Children’s Hospital and part of Nexus Multi-Academy Trust - is preparing to lose yet more teaching space. Last year he lost the school gym in Becton’s child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs) unit setting - it’s now a family room. Now he’s losing a classroom on an oncology ward. He’s not alone.

2 weeks ago | tes.com | Ellen Peirson-Hagger

“I get a lot of invitations to speak at schools and I say no to almost all of them, because I don’t have time to do retail, to do one school at a time.”That the American writer and academic Jonathan Haidt is in demand is no surprise: his agenda-setting polemic The Anxious Generation was already popular in the UK among those warning about the harms of social media and phones, but that popularity grew even further after the recent airing of the Netflix series Adolescence.