Laura McInerney | Schools Week

Kiran Gill, founder, the Difference

A year ago Kiran Gill was writing angry columns for Schools Week that kicked against the “no excuses” culture in schools that favoured the exclusion of children rather than determined inclusion. Then she disappeared. But the 28-year-old is back after a stint in the civil service silenced her for a time, and she’s ready to […]

Why we’ll keep looking at MAT CEO pay

It’s time for our annual chief executive pay league, a story that gets people hot under the collar and frantically sharing the paper. Some people hate it. Each year a few trusts refuse to comment on individuals’ pay and over the coming months I’ll get sharp-elbowed communications officers telling me exactly what they think of […]

Ofsted email scam asks people to ‘confirm’ Paypal details

Ofsted has warned the schools community to be vigilant over phishing emails purporting to be from the organisation. The watchdog issued guidance today after it had been notified some people had received spam emails which appeared to have been sent from an ofsted.gov.uk email account. The warning from Ofsted, issued on their official website, states: […]

The educational equivalent of the ‘brown shoe effect’

Children growing up in poorer families are less likely to get finance jobs because they don’t “present” themselves well enough at interviews. That’s the gist of a survey released this week by The Sutton Trust, a charity that aims to encourage social mobility. A press release says the survey quantifies the “brown shoe effect” – […]

We need to fix existing schools, not just build more

People are getting their knickers in a twist this week about a bunch of separate budget-related things but keep talking about them as if they are all the same issue. It is not helpful. The golden thread between the problems is money. There is only so much cash to go around, which is making the […]

Amanda Spielman, chief inspector, Ofsted

Two months into the job and Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s new chief inspector, has shot out of the traps as you would expect – with research in hand. Criticised by the education select committee for lacking passion, Spielman is well-known for being a data-nerd. As chair of qualifications regulator Ofqual, she zeroed in on making decisions […]

Robots should replace school receptionists, claims think tank

Robots should replace hundreds of workers at the Department for Education, a think tank has suggested, claiming the government is over-staffed with a “frozen middle” of managers unable to make decisions properly. Nearly 90,000 school administrators and receptionists should also be replaced by artificial intelligence, according to think tank Reform, in its new report Work […]

Beware John Blake, the “Red rebel” with great influence

My memory of early evening, Friday November 14, 2003, is hazy. My brain seems to think it was raining, and a Met Office report concurs. “Bands of heavy rain and showers were carried on gale-force south-westerly winds.” I’m pretty sure that a meeting I attended in the late afternoon took place after dark. A quick […]

Do we spend more or less on schools than in the past?

Many people believe you cannot put a price on education. They are wrong. For each child doing their GCSEs in 2013, the taxpayer paid somewhere between £47,000 and £67,000 for their schooling, depending on where the child grew up. This nugget of information is in Chris Belfield and Luke Sibieta’s masterful report, Long-run trends in […]