Expert Contributor | Schools Week

There are no easy answers to school refusal

School refusal may be a little more understood that when it was identified in the 1930s, but we still haven’t come up with any effective or pragmatic solutions, says Fran Morgan I didn’t choose to be an expert on school refusal; it chose me. When our daughter refused to go to primary school our main […]

Top tips for managing transport in schools

Transport safety in schools is about a lot more than an annual service of the school minibus, says Surekha Gollapudi In December 2014, a 15-year-old boy died after being struck by a minibus when he was crossing a road outside school to board his bus home. Bridgend council was later fined £300,000 for its failure […]

Jon Hutchinson’s top blogs of the week 15 April 2019

A part-transcript of a power and conflict poetry lesson with year 11 – “My Last Duchess” Claire Stoneman @stoneman_claire No matter how long you’ve been in the classroom, when an observer enters your classroom, you still get that flash of anxiety. It is, therefore, difficult to overstate the professional courage and generosity offered by Claire Stoneman, […]

Which types of school are more likely to off-roll students?

It seems impossible that nearly 50,000 pupils disappeared from schools last year for no apparent reason. But this is exactly what the Education Policy Institute’s most recent report revealed last week: between 2016 and 2017, one in twelve students didn’t progress from year 10 to 11 in the same state-funded secondary school, for reasons that […]

Education: A Manifesto for Change

I’m always wary of texts with the word “manifesto” in their title, and in this case that wariness was warranted. What the author describes as, “… a heads-up, big-picture piece, one that [he] urge[s] you to use to debate, discuss and develop new visions and values…” is actually little more than a rehashing of age-old […]

Who needs coding when it’s pupil safety that matters?

Schools would be better using their limited edtech resources to help pupils to stay safe and develop as informed citizens, argues Laura Larke As I listened to Damian Hinds announcing the Department for Education’s new educational technology strategy, the question that rattled around in my head was simply “Is this really what we should be […]

What does a ‘high quality’ ITE curriculum look like?

Successful ITE curricula are co-designed and co-taught across a partnership, says Jan Rowe Ofsted’s recent attempt to confirm what some in its research division think is wrong with teacher education raises the important issue of curriculum in initial teacher education (ITE). But just as with the curriculum in schools, the risk is that a curriculum […]

Too many children are disappearing from school rolls

There are still too many unexplained exits from schools, at a level that cannot be in the best interests of either schools or pupils, says Jo Hutchinson Children are being pushed around the school system in England on an industrial scale. The number of anecdotal reports of off-rolling has become deafening, and today EPI has […]

SATs are the fairest way to judge pupil progress

Teachers and pupils should not have any reason to be stressed about SATs, and it is up to headteachers to ensure that is the case, says Cassie Young Exam season is upon us, and that brings with it the inevitable calls for the end of tests. Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to eliminate SATs in year […]