Expert Contributor | Schools Week

Easy books aren’t the route to a lifelong love of reading

Forget the pap: kids should have access to good quality books to get them to read, says Katie Ashford. In the past I have gone to great lengths to persuade reluctant readers to pick up a book and, as many teachers will know, this is never a straightforward task. Hopeful that their efforts will pay […]

Let the teens read Mills & Boon!

Kids should be exposed to all kinds of books (and that includes Mills & Boon), says Joy Ballard. As a teacher, I know that instilling hard-to-reach and reluctant young students with a love of reading is one of the most difficult aspects of our job – yet in many respects it is also the most […]

How politics changed education in 2016

What would have seemed more likely at the start of the year, asks Natalie Perera. Brexit, more grammars or a new prime minister? Twelve months on and you’ve got the lot. It’s been a tumultuous year in politics. In generations to come, GCSE (or whatever the equivalent will be) students will be sitting exams and […]

The ups and downs of school finances have been exhausting to watch

It’s been a bumpy year, with school leaders left wondering who to watch for the next flurry of activity, says Matthew Clements-Wheeler. As I write this, my daughter is happily bouncing with her friends at a party in a nearby indoor trampoline park. This group of teenagers is the perfect metaphor for education policy, ministerial […]

Best education research of 2016 for schools

Stuart Kime carefully picks out his favourite pieces of research for 2016. He enjoys them all, but the publishers of academic journals and the funding streams of higher education leave him with a bitter taste. My experience of reading education research is similar to my experience of eating Quality Street: the Purple Ones are things […]

How SEND became a headline issue in 2016

There have been a few low points, but champions for pupils with SEND still emerged this year, says Anita Kerwin Nye. Many of the same variables have impacted learners with special needs in 2016 as other children: system restructure; the downplaying of lower-level and non EBacc qualifications; teacher recruitment and austerity. But for young people […]

The big topics for headteachers in 2016 (and reasons to be cheerful!)

It hasn’t been easy, but Liam Collins is determined to keep “the positive energy up”. I wanted to be more positive this year. So I wrote a list, and one side was much longer than the other. Still, I’m going to try to keep the positive energy up. To help, let’s take the classic structure […]

Two thirds of pupils from low-income backgrounds not ‘secondary ready’ by the end of primary

This morning, results from this spring’s key stage 2 assessments were published for over 16,000 primary and special schools. These are important as they are the first school level results to be published against the new ‘without levels’ assessments. They also use the Department for Education’s new value-added measures of progress. What leaps out immediately […]

Our school textbooks are all wrong

The content of our textbooks is fine – to a point. The books do what they are sold to do: teach children what they need to pass the exam for which they’ve been written. But these days a textbook is not, in a traditional sense, a textbook. It’s an exam primer. Current textbooks are crafted […]