Oxford vice-chancellor facing anxious weekend as he awaits decision on whether reform plans will be put to a postal ballot.

Colleges have complained that a new government method for measuring “value added” penalises them if their students do too well in their A-levels.

Teenagers face a reform of exam courses at 16 as the government tries to prove it is not wedded only to A-levels.

A conference in York takes an enlightening look at disability in the middle ages and beyond, writes Christopher Baswell.

U8, a group of students from diverse backgrounds and countries, launches its first hard-hitting consultation paper, which questions international development priorities.

Court battles would not resolve underlying issues of religious identity on university campuses and would only create division, a report from an independent thinktank has warned.

Britain risks “sleepwalking into a future shaped by extremists” unless academics make their voices more clearly heard, the country’s most senior scientist has warned.

Pupils must be offered ‘real choices’ in their education, the prime minister says as he announces an expansion of his controversial academies programme.

Timothy Garton Ash: Oxford is having a great debate about its future. But ultimately everyone in Europe must make a conscious choice.

Technological advances mean that now even dentists and surgeons can study by correspondence, writes Tatum Anderson.

What do all those acronyms mean? Which is the best course? And how can I get a job afterwards? Jenny Johnson guides you through the basics of choosing a Tefl course.

We welcome the news that ministers have, with some qualifications, been converted to the International Baccalaureate. Tony Blair is said to favour the IB being made more readily available to state school pupils and Alan Johnson sees it as a viable alternative to A-levels. It is true that the IB offers a broader and, some would say, more taxing alternative to A-levels and as such will stretch and challenge pupils more. But the danger is that the Government’s obsession with choice will lead to it neglecting much-needed reforms to GCSE and A-levels that the Education Secretary acknowledges will still be the main route to higher education for the vast majority of 16- to 18-year-olds.

Next week Lord Dearing will publish his interim report on the state of languages in Britain. I sincerely hope that there will be an immediate recommendation to reverse the misguided decision by the former education secretary, Estelle Morris, to make languages optional from ages 14 to 16.

Hilary’s advice

Is modern life cooking up a new kind of human being, whose altered circuitry will cause them to think and act differently from people today? It sounds like science fiction, but a growing number of specialists feel that tomorrow’s classrooms are likely to be filled with pupils who will think more episodically, have shorter attention spans, communicate through pictures rather than words, have more learning difficulties, and be less able to control their impulses and emotions than the children of today.

The proportion of Bangladeshi and Pakistani 18-year-olds in England and Wales who are not in work, education or training has more than doubled in two years

Forty years after the Plowden report, education for the under-11s is being reviewed, and the mastermind behind the project has some radical ideas. Peter Wilby reports.