Freddie Whittaker | Schools Week

1 in 8 LA-maintained schools now in deficit as primaries’ financial health worsens

One in eight local authority-maintained schools were in deficit in the last financial year, up from less than one in ten the year before. Local authority school expenditure data, published by the Department for Education today, found the proportion of LA schools in deficit rose to 12 per cent in 2019-20, up from 9.9 per […]

Revealed: The 77 schools set to run new £65m ‘teaching school hubs’

Seventy-seven schools have been selected to run 81 new teaching school hubs across England, with £65 million in funding made available by government. It takes the total number of hubs to 87. Six initial hubs were announced in January last year with £1.1 million in initial funding, though this represented a scaling-back of the original […]

Gibb: ‘Challenge’ schools with low EBacc entries to address ‘unequal opportunities’

Schools with low EBacc entries must be “challenged” to address “unequal opportunities” in the system, Nick Gibb has said. The schools minister told MPs this morning that the government needed to “double down” on its reforms since 2010, as he warned some settings still had very low take-up of the EBacc suite of academic subjects. […]

School attendance rises to 16% as key worker numbers leap

School attendance has climbed again to around 16 per cent, with 23 per cent of primary pupils now going to school. Data published by the Department for Education today shows 15.9 per cent of pupils – around 1.29 million children – attended state schools last Thursday, up from 14.9 per cent the week before. The […]

‘All ideas on the table’ says catch-up tsar as Johnson won’t rule out extending school term

All ideas to address lost learning should be “on the table”, the government’s new catch-up tsar has said, after the prime minister failed to rule out extending the summer term. Sir Kevan Collins, the former head of the Education Endowment Foundation, told BBC News that the government was “going to have to ask teachers to […]

Covid-19 has hit exam years hardest, finds study of 62,000 pupils

Exam students have been hit hardest by Covid-19, a new report has found. A study by non-profit research organisation ImpactEd also found that those children who struggled the most were not always those previously identified as vulnerable. The study tracked things like wellbeing, anxiety and home learning in a group of more than 62,000 pupils […]

Will £6m Institute of Teaching’s legacy be shortlived?

The government’s new Institute of Teaching could be freed from its obligations to the government within just four years, prompting fears about the project’s longevity. The Department for Education told potential providers that it does not expect to reprocure the contract to run the Institute of Teaching at the end of its initial framework agreement. […]

Leaders forced to cap places as school attendance rises

Primaries are being forced to cap pupil places amid soaring school attendance rates as the Covid crisis takes its toll on families. Attendance peaked at 1.2 million last week, meaning that 15 per cent of pupils were in school, the highest level recorded this term. The rise has been driven by an increase in primary […]

DfE names 21 free schools approved in wave 14

Twenty-one more free schools have been approved under wave 14 of the programme, which is again dominated by multi-academy trusts. Ministers have announced the first successful free school projects since June 2019. It follows substantial delays to the application process launched two years ago. Wave 14 was first launched in January 2019 by former education […]