Expert Contributor | Schools Week

What do the best education system leaders do?

When I describe system leadership, what I mean is the way that groups of talented leaders work together to form plans and take decisions that have an impact on the outcomes and experiences of children in a whole community, and not just the school they attend. Why is this important? When we are planning something […]

Teachers must tell pupils the importance of voter turnout

The economics of Brexit will be crucial for everyone, says Anand Menon. A smaller economy means more difficult choices – and perhaps a smaller education budget In a recent online piece for Schools Week, Russell Hobby made the sensible point that one outcome of the recent referendum will be “distraction and delay”. He is dead […]

Education reform: How to take back control of schools from government

“The power of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.” John Dunning, motion in Parliament, 1780. For those working in education, it won’t have taken the act of self-immolation of June 23 to notice a growing feeling of powerlessness and mute rage in the face of an over-centralised, over-mighty state that […]

Ensuring more women progress into education leadership

A 2008 McKinsey report highlighted that the most powerful force holding women back is entrenched beliefs. To address this, at the Festival of Education four of the WomenEd national leaders focused on one of our core values – confidence. Keziah Featherstone explored one of the privileges of headship which is to nurture leadership talent. Both children […]

Exams may have got easier, but pupils have an appetite for hard questions

Exam question changes in the past two decades have often been made for clarity and “accessibility”, says Tim Oates. But A-level questions from decades ago now available on the web, are proving that there is still a huge appetite for demanding physics Social media allows global circulation of all sorts of conversations that previously would […]

Rewards, rather than punishments, help teenagers learn

What have you been working on? We used a combination of lab-based computer tasks and computational learning models to compare how adolescents and adults learn to make choices, based on different types of feedback. Adolescent and adult volunteers played a computer task, in which they saw different pairs of abstract symbols on a computer screen, […]

Access arrangements — are they a right or a privilege?

Recent changes to the official guidelines on access arrangements and assistive technology have wide-reaching implications for all pupils if implemented equitably, argues Andrew Harland Access arrangements (AA) help pupils with special educational needs, learning difficulties, disabilities or temporary injuries, to access the exam system. They are often seen as the preserve of pupils with special […]

‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ – what it means for schools

Changes to statutory guidance on ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ will come into effect in September 2016. Mark Orchison explains what this means for schools. The new government safeguarding guidance requires schools to put in place an effective and appropriate whole-school approach to online safety. Previous guidance focussed mainly on Prevent, but this updated guidance […]

Mandatory web monitoring in schools opens a slippery can of worms

While the compulsory retention of every website visit for every person in the UK was recently debated and passed in the House of Commons in the Investigatory Powers Bill, the plans for statutory surveillance of every child’s Internet use, in schools and at home, has gone unnoticed. Without Parliamentary or public discussion, children’s internet use […]