1. A full programme from Pearson over the next few weeks, outlined in this blog post, Back to School: What to expect in the coming weeks https://www.english.com/blog/back-to-school-2021/

Week 1 activities include a ‘back to school worksheet’ https://www.english.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Worksheet_A4-BrE.pdf to help teachers and their new classes get to know each other better. PDF below.

2. I didn’t know we had a Student Futures Commission in the UK https://upp-foundation.org/student-futures-commission/ Its Chair, Mary Curnock Cook, has just written this piece for the WONKHE blog on post-Covid 19 priorities for supporting student success https://wonkhe.com/blogs/students-need-universities-to-prioritise-inclusion-and-academic-confidence-in-the-years-ahead/

She highlights one comment by Geoff Layer, chair of the Disabled Students’ Commission https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/disabled-students-commission/ who noted that disabled students felt that the things they had been asking for over many years, but were told they couldn’t have, had been delivered in days and weeks when the pandemic hit

and another by Mhairi Underwood from The Student Room https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/ who had heard students identifying as being from the “cohort with the fake grades” (as a result of the cancellation of school exams).

3. I checked with colleagues in South East Asia earlier today if this piece on Forgetting My First Language from the New Yorker could be read without a subscription, and they said yes, so here goes: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/forgetting-my-first-language PDF below, as it seems (surprisingly?) to be free access.

4. And, finally and much less light-heartedly than is often the case, here’s the Swedish PEN special issue on Hate Speech https://www.penopp.org/all-themes/hatespeech

and here’s the one on Linguistic Rights https://www.penopp.org/all-themes/linguistic-rights, both a mixture of short and long pieces and poems.

‘What is really a mother tongue?’ asks Carlos Torner in this piece https://www.penopp.org/articles/mother-tongue-babel?language_content_entity=en