It would have been reasonable to wonder how long the experiment would last when St. Columba College opened in 1997 with 207 students and a truly unique founding concept—a coeducational school jointly established by Anglican and Catholic Archbishops. After almost thirty years, the school now has about 1,450 students, a $20 million secondary building at Andrews Farm in South Australia, and two Archbishops have unveiled a commemorative plaque. It is difficult to overlook the symmetry. The new structure is large. There are twelve classrooms, outdoor learning spaces, a Wellbeing Hub, a dedicated Diverse Learning Center, and—most importantly—a specially designed dark…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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You might completely miss it if you stroll down Oxford’s Merton Street on a calm morning. Unlike some of its larger neighbors, Corpus Christi College does not make a big deal out of its location between Merton and Christ Church. By Oxford standards, the entrance is modest, with a tower over the main gate and a honeyed stone facade that gives the impression that the building has existed for a longer period of time than your current concerns. It has. The college was established in 1517, making it older than Shakespeare, the Protestant Reformation, and the notion of England as…
Forty-six-year-old Benjamin Pinckney is a former Army combat medic, a recent graduate of Lehman College in the Bronx, and a man whose life was once saved in an emergency room by a medical assistant. His goal is to work as a PA. He’s not sure he can afford to under a new federal rule that will go into effect on July 1, 2026. He said to ABC News, “If nothing changes, then my dream of being a PA is probably shot.” That is the kind of narrative that transforms a regulatory dispute into something that people genuinely care about. Early…
A small British early childhood education organization sending emergency funds to the Philippines following a devastating typhoon seems almost ridiculous. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s United Kingdom committee, OMEP UK, is primarily funded by membership dues and small grants. There are no famous people who represent it. No fancy dinners for fundraising. Nevertheless, OMEP UK managed to organize assistance for young children and their families caught in the debris when Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Visayas in November 2013, affecting over 11 million people and destroying entire coastal towns. The scale mismatch is worth pausing over. $500 million in…
Most small nonprofit chapters just cannot afford the time, money, and institutional stubbornness required to send a delegation halfway across the globe. Since 2008, OMEP Aotearoa, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s New Zealand branch, has been able to accomplish this every year by sending educators, researchers, and occasionally postgraduate students to the city hosting the annual OMEP World Assembly and Conference. This streak seems insignificant until you take the logistics into account: New Zealand is about as far away from Europe as any inhabited nation can be, and although its early childhood education system is well-regarded abroad, travel…
Several hundred early childhood educators arrived at the Instituto del Profesorado Sagrado Corazón in Buenos Aires for two days in early May. They brought conference programs, tote bags, and, in many cases, anecdotes about classrooms that are gradually losing ground. The event was the 19th National Gathering of OMEP Argentina, commemorating the organization’s 60th anniversary. Art, bodies, play, and the right to cultural expression in early childhood education were the official themes. The question of whether Argentina’s youngest children will continue to have access to public early education programs, which have taken decades to develop, was, by most accounts, the…
The way reality TV chooses its stars these days is almost comically predictable. Good bone structure, a somewhat entrepreneurial past, a fitness-focused Instagram presence, and just enough mystery to keep Reddit threads going past midnight. The gorgeous 22-year-old Corbin Mims, who joined the Love Island USA Season 8 villa in Episode 4, is almost a perfect fit. However, compared to the typical influencer origin story, his college background—which has become its own little internet rabbit hole—adds a twist that is at least slightly more intriguing. In December 2025, Corbin earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Stetson University in DeLand,…
After taking Pearson Edexcel’s A Level Mathematics Paper 1, students from all over England filed out of exam rooms on the afternoon of June 3, appearing visibly shaken. Thousands of people signed a Change.org petition calling for a fair review of the paper within hours. That figure had risen above 34,000 by the next week. The national exam authority, Ofqual, said in a statement that it was “closely monitoring” the marking procedure. According to Pearson, grade boundaries would change if the paper turned out to be more difficult than in prior years. Additionally, most math teachers on Reddit were perplexed…
When a student opened the first page of Pearson Edexcel’s A Level Mathematics Paper 1 in an exam room early on June 3, they quickly realized that this was not what their two years of preparation had prepared them for. Thousands of students discovered a Change.org petition calling for a fair review of the paper within hours of leaving the hall. It had more than 20,000 signatures in less than a day. Along with more than £2,500 in donations, the number was over 34,000 at the time of the last count. Since then, England’s exam authority, Ofqual, has acknowledged that…
Twenty-year-old James “Weston” Higginbotham was a student at Auburn University studying biosystems engineering. By all accounts, he was the type of person who would carry a spider outside instead of stepping on it. He was an environmentalist, a vegan, and a young man who disagreed with his own mother about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence while on vacation. The final meaningful conversation his family would have with him was during that argument about her using ChatGPT to locate restaurants in Japan. On May 25, the Higginbothams traveled together to Japan for what was supposed to be Grayton, Weston’s younger…