Quibbling Siblings: How Competitive Are You with Your Sibling? Trying to outdo your brother or sister during childhood is part and parcel of a family environment, but exactly how competitive are you and your sibling? Our recent research found that nearly 40% of UK adults still feel a rivalry with their brothers and sisters, while […]

ON the 5th October 2017, Blade Runner 2049, the long await sequel to the science fiction movie classic, Blade Runner is released. These two movies (certainly the first at least) are amongst many seminal science-fiction films that owe their origins to the author Philip K. Dick. Although Philip K. Dick died in 1982, his legacy […]

A few weeks ago I wrote about the gender pay gap. That is the difference between the average hourly rate earned by men and women. The gap is getting smaller, with men earning 18.4% more than women in 2017, compared to 27.5% in 1997. It is, however, still quite a large gap. But is this […]

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story in 1886. It was published a year later in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887. Holmes was instantly popular, and went on to feature in a further 56 short stories and 4 novels by Conan Doyle over the next 40 years. However, the stories of Sherlock Homes, the […]

General Francisco Franco (more commonly known as Franco) ruled Spain as a military dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975, leading a brutal regime where hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were killed, and many more imprisoned and tortured, and yet this era of Spanish history which was right on our doorstep is often […]

My general advice to A Level students has always been to set yourself a study timetable from the very beginning. I began studying an English Literature A Level course in June 2014. Having worked as a student adviser with Oxford Open Learning for the best part of a decade I felt I was mentally well […]

Today is A level results day and the first result that we have had is great news for the Oxford Open Learning office team. One of our Student Advisers, Lee Woodward has been studying English Literature A level via our distance learning course and he has been awarded a fantastic grade A. Lee studied the […]

An answer to the question above will follow shortly. But perhaps, before we go into details, we should simply spell it out; UCI – Unique Candidate Number ULN – Unique Learning Number PLR – Personal Learning Record The LRS – Learning Record Service People in government and education seem to be obsessed with acronyms. New […]

The announcement yesterday that Russell Brand’s views on drugs, Caitlin Moran’s Twitter feed and the thoughts of Dizzee Rascal will be added to the OCR exam board’s English A-level reading list was met by the oh-so-predictable media storm. Arriving as a result of the education secretary Michael Gove’s proposed A-level reforms, OCR teamed up with […]

This year it has been more difficult than ever to decide which of the many contenders should take our  Student of the Year title. As always, there has been a huge number of people gaining excellent grades in Maths, English and/or Science GCSE/IGCSE, enabling them to go on to study and hopefully fulfill their ambitions […]