Skip to content
28 April 2026

Author: Alix Robertson

London secondary school hit with financial notice to improve over failure to balance budget

A secondary school in Richmond upon Thames has been handed a financial notice to improve by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), after failing to set a balanced budget for 2017-18. The school, rated ‘requires improvement’ by Ofsted after an inspection in January, has also failed to “establish strong internal financial controls”, according to […]

Government fund will enable teachers across the globe to share lessons over WhatsApp

The government has announced new funding for overseas teachers to visit UK schools, and will pair up more educators to run “classroom-to-classroom” activities over WhatsApp. The Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning programme programme aims to “forge a global understanding of what education can achieve”. It is an extension of two older projects run by the […]

The 6 key points from EPI’s ‘Secondary School Choice in England’ report

The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has published new analysis looking at how parents choose which secondary schools to send their children to in England. Each child can list up to six secondary schools they want to apply to, which parents rank in order of preference. These are submitted to the local authority who then allocate […]

Schools warned over new ‘harmful’ Transgender Trend stickers

The charity Stonewall has condemned the actions of pressure group Transgender Trend in publishing a set of stickers on its website which promote messages such as “kids shouldn’t be taught in school that they can choose to be a boy or a girl”. The stickers, which director of Transgender Trend Stephanie Davies-Arai‏ recommended to put “all over […]

EEF: Group pupils within classes rather than setting or streaming

Grouping pupils by their attainment for specific activities within their usual classes is more likely to boost attainment than setting or streaming, research by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has found. The practice of setting or streaming– where pupils with similar levels of current attainment are grouped together for lessons – is unlikely to boost […]

Less than half of pupils understand GCSE reforms, survey finds

Less than half of pupils understand why the government has reformed GCSE qualifications, despite over half a million pounds of public money being spent on explaining the changes. According to a new Ipsos Mori survey, only 48 per cent of school pupils who had heard of the changes to the GCSE grading system actually understood why […]

New education and skills team appointed at Policy Exchange

Former teacher and government adviser Tom Richmond and Dr Joanna Williams, from the University of Kent, will head up a new education and skills team at the right-leaning think tank Policy Exchange. The pair will work on topics including how poor behaviour in schools is affecting children’s learning, and whether it is having an impact […]

The 4 main trends in the 2018 KS2 primary test results

Provisional results of the primary school key stage 2 SATs tests broken down at local authority and regional level have been released by the Department for Education this morning. Here are the main points from today’s new data. 1. Reading results saw the greatest improvement In reading, 75 per cent of pupils reached the expected […]