Community

Get them while they’re young: A baby forms 700 new neural connections per second.By Peter CoyBrain science and economics show that intervening to help children when they’re very young is more cost-effective than waiting until they’re in school. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Bridgespan Group and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative. The report’s lead author, J.B. Pritzker, is an entrepreneur and philanthropist; his sister, Penny, is the U.S. secretary of commerce.

Turn parent-teacher conferences into productive, positive conversations that strengthen your child’s learning and school success.

As the competition for brains heats up, more U.S. students are heading to the UK to earn their college degrees.Students have come back to college. But not all to the United States.

Three decades ago, Chinese cities began turning rural land into industrial parks to attract foreign investors. Today, a new kind of project is blooming in China’s countryside: the vocational education park.Cities around China are carving out tracts of land for school parks – dubbed “education factories” – designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.

Hoping to offer more alternatives, particularly to low-income students considering substandard for-profit colleges, the Education Department is unveiling a pilot program on Wednesday to allow students to use federal loans and grants for nontraditional education like boot camp software coding programs and MOOCs, or massive open online courses.

Place a 30cm ruler on top of one finger from each hand. What happens when you bring your fingers together?Can archaeology prove or disprove the Bible?Two tricky questions of the sort asked at interviews for Oxford University places, which are being published by the university ahead of the application deadline for 2016 entry on Wednesday.

A small cut in the pupil-teacher ratio and the creation of 2,260 additional teaching posts are the key education measures of Budget 2016.The Department of Education and Skills is to receive an extra €144 million next year, bringing its budget to €8.5 billion.From next September, the pupil-teacher ratio at primary level will fall from 28:1 to 27:1. This will require about 300 extra teaching posts. Some 810 mainstream teaching posts are also being created to address demographic demand.

When we think of education technology, we often imagine large-scale impact and reach. But it’s not that straightforward.Stacked amidst temporary shelters, tents and thatched huts in Burundi’s Kavumu refugee camp are a pile of bright blue, green and yellow boxes. Stowed away in these 800 kg metal palette-size boxes are countless ideas to educate, entertain and foster creativity among refugees. The self-contained watertight boxes are packed with e-readers, tablets, cameras, e-books, paperbacks, board games and e-learning tools to offer educational and training opportunities to refugee children and adults and prepare them to reintegrate the world. In less than 20 minutes, the boxes are unfolded into interactive media centres with tables and chairs.

More than half of the world’s countries have failed to achieve gender parity in education for girls in primary and secondary schools, according to a new U.N. report.