What do PISA scores actually tell us about a country? Judging from data rather than headlines and rhetoric, the answer seems to be 'not a lot'.
Each year the UK police are disproportionately stopping and searching large numbers of Black and Asian people for drug possession, amounting to mass police interference in everyday life. Is an answer decriminalising drug possession?
The historical misdirection involved in 'being liberal' persists today and affects those vulnerable to ideological revisionism. We must protect them.
We may be in the early phase of a slow-moving revolution, which will only be perceptible in hindsight. As projects within these five pillars emerge, the infrastructure, norms and cultural acceptance for a more connected, creative, open financial system may begin to emerge and coalesce into reality
Politicans are stoking fears and tensions because they are powerless to do anything of substance. This is the worst of all worlds. It is cynical, irresponsible, inflammatory and exposes a major democratic deficit.
After a wave of occupations - and a crack down from police and university administrations - the British student movement is back.
The right not to be enslaved is one of the two absolute human rights that cannot be violated on any ground whatsoever. However, 65 years after its denunciation, slavery continues to resist the corpus of human rights. Why the asymmetry ?
This is a year-long experiment in knowledge exchange and co-production, aimed at exploring what emerges when academics and community participants try to learn from each other.
A new campaign by the UK Government’s Home Office, This Is Abuse, is a critical step to preventing violence against women and girls, but the Department for Education’s failure to support it is baffling, says Holly Dustin
When you hear a politician or a company boasting about "investment", always ask what the investors are getting in return.
A group of tenants occupied a flat in East London to protest against rising rents and government subsidies for unaffordable housing. Samir Jeraj interviewed them about Britain's housing crisis, and what is to be done.
Kerem Öktem is one of the co-authors of the recently published booklet, Freedom in Diversity. Ten Lessons for Public Policy from Britain, Canada, France, Germany and the United States. Here, for openDemocracy, he brings the lessons close to home.