education

Fears over Army targeting deprived schools debated by AMs

Concerns over how many visits army officers make to schools in deprived areas will be debated by assembly members on Wednesday.

---

Visits to schools by BAE Systems and the RAF

Evidence suggests that the BAE Systems-RAF team that visits primary and secondary schools ostensibly to encourage students to take an interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, gives students a sanitised, glamourised image of both BAE and the RAF.

---

ForcesWatch welcomes Welsh Government stance over military visits to schools

The Welsh Government has been praised by ForcesWatch over a “groundbreaking” decision to support in principle more research into how the armed forces operate in secondary schools in Wales.

---

Government Cadet Programme Cynically Targeting the Poor

"The Tory Government are preying on school children in some of our most deprived areas by setting up more and more military cadet units as a step to recruiting them into the armed forces."

---

Updates on £50m for over 300 new Cadet units in disadvantaged state schools

Here are several updates following last week's government budget announcement that £50 million would go to expanding the number of state school Combined Cadet Forces to 500 (an increase of over 300), focusing on disadvantaged schools.   * Criticisms of the funding decision have come from the National Youth Agency ("it's a real missed opportunity not to have invested some of it in good quality youth work which delivers 'character' and a whole lot more besides for young people"), and the Quakers (“Ultimately, militarism in schools leads to two kinds of recruitment: the recruitment of teenagers into the armed forces, and the recruitment of wider society to be war ready. Both go undebated. Why can’t we invest in education for peace, not war?”)

---

Cadet units in state schools to increase five-fold with £50 million budget boost

The number of cadet units in state schools is to increase five-fold by 2020, George Osborne announced today in the Summer Budget.

---

Update on Army attempt to obtain sensitive student data for recruitment purposes

Following our recent piece on the news story that the Ministry of Defence requested access (which the Department for Education rejected) to the database of sensitive data of school students in England, to help the Army better target its recruitment practice, it has emerged that the Army - in collaboration with Royal Holloway College and the mobile phone app specialists DotNet - was specifically seeking to match individuals’ data with specific Army jobs, with a mobile phone app an apparent intended output. This and other revelations undermine the claims by the MoD quoted in the original news coverage of the story that they aren’t targeting individuals for recruitment, and that the request was an error that had been “halted”.

---

Military ethos in schools is not character education but recruitment propaganda, claim Mark Thomas and Clare Short

In a new film from the Quakers, comedian Mark Thomas and former MP Clare Short claim the Government is misusing the education system to encourage support for its wars and to promote careers in the armed forces.

---

Welsh Gov told to review the way British military recruits in Welsh schools

The Welsh Government has been told to review of the way the British Armed Forces are allowed to recruit in Welsh schools.

---

Critical scrutiny of military ethos initiatives continues

An example of how critical scrutiny of the Military Ethos in Schools programme is being sustained from people outside of ForcesWatch, comes from an Institute of Education conference in February 2015, where Victoria Basham, senior lecturer in Politics at Exeter University, gave a critical overview of the Department for Education's Military Ethos in Schools programme. Her talk was filmed, and can be viewed online here...

---