Schools

What do you get when you combine artificial intelligence with human stupidity? There are, unfortunately, numerous responses to that question. But in this particular case the answer can be found in Iowa's Mason City Community School District, where school administrators are using ChatGPT to help them ban books.

It has been 20 years since the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) started running its annual CLPE Children's Poetry Award (CLiPPA), after the Signal Poetry Award was discontinued in 2003.  Read more

With book banning and legislative attacks on the freedom to read continuing to surge across the country, the American Library Association announced today that it tracked a stunning 1,269 "demands to censor library books and resources" in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago, and nearly double the reco  Read more

In my 15 years of teaching English to hundreds of children in various parts of England, there are four books that have been on the curriculum in every school I have found myself in, with no exception: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Animal Farm by George Orwell, An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.  Read more

All of the UK's children's laureates, including Cressida Cowell, Quentin Blake, Malorie Blackman and Michael Rosen, are uniting to call for the government to dedicate £100m a year to revitalising "deteriorating" primary school libraries across the country, amid fears that literacy levels have dropped severely during the pandemic.  Read more