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Editorial team
If you are looking to speak to someone about…
A press release? news@schoolsweek.co.uk
A news story or tip-off? Freddie.Whittaker@schoolsweek.co.uk
A features idea, opinion column, or book review? Catherine.Murray@schoolsweek.co.uk
Shane Mann is managing director
Shane is the managing director of Lsect, the publisher of Schools Week and FE Week, and managing editor of Schools Week. He is responsible for the for overall management and performance of the organisation, and is also the managing director of our sister organisation Summerhouse Events, which runs the prestigious The Telegraph Festival of Education and Festival of Skills.
Join Dickens is editor
John.dickens@schoolsweek.co.uk
Laura McInerney is contributing editor
Laura McInerney is contributing editor. She held the position of editor from January 2015 until the end of 2017. Prior to that she taught in East London for six years, wrote a book in 2011, The 6 Predictable Failures of Free Schools…and How To Avoid Them, and became a regular columnist for The Guardian.
Laura’s superpowers include encyclopedic knowledge of past education secretaries and the ability to stop a year 9 boy in his tracks with just a stare.
She tweets as @miss_mcinerney, prolifically.
laura.mcinerney@schoolsweek.co.uk
Cath Murray is features editor and head of digital
Cath spends her days balancing her roles as features editor for Schools Week and our sister publication FE Week, and heading up the digital side of things for both publications.
She doesn’t mind the juggling act, as it’s a refreshing change from the many years she spent holed up in an office in Andalucia, translating and editing articles for science journals.
Cath loves encouraging people who are passionate about what they do to get involved in the debate, and in her spare time devours books, blogs and research insatiably.
Having lived abroad for over a decade, her special skill is to take on an entirely different personality whenever she speaks a foreign language.
catherine.murray@schoolsweek.co.uk
Freddie Whittaker is chief reporter
Freddie has been writing about public policy for most of his career, initially as a senior reporter for the Gloucester Citizen and Gloucestershire Echo, and then as the Oxford Mail’s political and local government reporter.
He joined our sister paper, FE Week, in January 2014, and moved to the Schools Week team in August 2015, becoming the paper’s political reporter in January 2016.
Appointed chief reporter in August 2017, Freddie still covers the politics beat, and can often be found tweeting furiously from windowless press rooms at political party and trade union conferences.
He is also a regular contributor to the New Statesman on education policy and political issues.
Freddie lives in south–east London but retains strong ties with his home town of Stroud, Gloucestershire, where he helps run the annual Stroud Fringe festival.
freddie.whittaker@schoolsweek.co.uk
Alix Robertson is senior reporter
In a past life Alix was a secondary school English teacher and still misses having her own form group. No one in the office has ever made her a plastic friendship bracelet.
Having dabbled in student journalism and set up a magazine at university, she introduced a school newspaper while teaching and is expecting the budding reporters she mentored to steal her job any day now.
Alix retrained as a journalist at City University in 2013, and a certain Miss McInerney was her first ever on-camera interviewee.
In her first year of work she won a ‘MHP 30 to Watch’ award, then joined Schools Week’s sister paper FE Week, where she learned all about vocational education and was a runner up in the CIPR education journalism awards.
She is very excited to be getting back into the world of schools and will be covering everything there is to know about academies.
alix.robertson@schoolsweek.co.uk
Jess Staufenberg is a senior reporter
Jess trained as a reporter in Brighton before heading to Norfolk as a business journalist for the Eastern Daily Press.
After training across the paper and local station MustardTV, she returned to London and wrote about education for Al Jazeera, Times Educational Supplement, the Daily Telegraph before taking a permanent role at The Independent and then eventually leaving for Schools Week.
Data gleaned from freedom of information requests and investigations are her bag, but she also loves a good profile interview.
Outside of the newsroom, she surfs in Devon, hikes and spends a lot of time in the pub.
Her special skill is swearing in German.
jess.staufenberg@schoolsweek.co.uk
Neil Stott
March 7, 2017 at 12:02 pm
Great news that the Education Secretary Justine Greening has said that children from the age of four will be taught about safe and healthy relationships and that age-appropriate lessons will have emphasis on what constitutes a healthy relationship, the dangers of sexting, online pornography and sexual harassment.
But as very recently-retired former Deputy Headteacher of a large 11-18 Academy responsible for curriculum, staffing timetabling and Safeguarding, I wonder who will teach these topics and more importantly will they be equipped with the skills, confidence and knowledge required to do it well.
Figures recently released by the Schools Minister Nick Gibb show that just 54 citizenship teachers (the staff who often deliver Personal, Social and Health Education – PSHE) have been trained this past academic year, compared with 112 in 2014-15 and 243 in 2010-11.
When constructing a timetable for 1800 students and over 100 teachers with the emphasis on results in Maths, English and every other subject that make up the new performance measures, the reality is that anything that does not count is the last thing that schools and academies will staff.
The teaching of PSHE will often be assigned to whichever teacher has space on their weekly timetables, regardless of their subject specialism.
Some schools get around this by making PSHE part of tutor time where all form teachers squeeze its delivery into a short time frame, in addition to their daily administrative tasks.
As any young person, who has left compulsory education, will tell you they vividly remember their first sex education lesson but will usually be less than complimentary about its content and delivery.
They will have learnt more from their peers and as they are more comfortable with technology found “answers” from the Internet.
Future generations, who will not have known a world without social media, will be even more tech savvy and able to find answers for most questions at the click of a button, and will therefore also have less human contact than previous generations.
If they think that what they see online in the form of pornography (the average age of first exposure to pornography is 11 years of age) and discuss with their social media “friends” what they think constitutes a healthy relationship, then our young people will be putting themselves at risk of being ill- informed and ill-equipped for later life, regardless of what they have been taught in schools.
I feel so passionately and concerned about this subject that having just left mainstream education I have established a unique service, called WNTAI (we never talk about it) to educate and inform adults and children about the risks of online pornography.
I hope the planned Government consultation will consider the concerns that we should all have.