Author: Freddie Whittaker

An A-level paper due to be sat by thousands of pupils this Thursday is to be replaced amid concerns over cheating, the exam board Edexcel has said. An investigation by Pearson, Edexcel’s parent company, has found that a packet containing copies of its further maths A-level paper was opened at a school. The breach was […]

It would cost almost £5 billion to reverse funding cuts experienced by schools since 2009 and protect their budgets until 2023, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said, following a series of funding pledges by Tory leadership contenders. New analysis shows schools need an extra £3.8 billion a year to bring them up to the […]

The government will continue to prioritise social mobility no matter who takes over as prime minister, the education secretary has said. Damian Hinds said today it was a “good thing” that school funding and other education issues had been so prominent in the leadership campaign, adding that he expects his successor to continue to focus […]

The government will amend the school admissions code to “accelerate” the process of moving vulnerable children between schools, Damian Hinds has announced today. The education secretary told an event organised by the Reform think tank today that it was “very, very important” for so-called children in need to be in school to help them avoid […]

Three senior national officials at one of the country’s largest teaching unions have been serving lengthy suspensions following disputes with the organisation’s top team, Schools Week can reveal. In one case, a senior staffer at NASUWT has been off work for more than a year and a half, while two others were suspended around a […]

The government will spend up to £20 million supplying free sanitary products to schools and colleges across England, it has emerged. The chancellor Philip Hammond announced in his spring statement that all secondary pupils would get access to free sanitary products from September this year in a bid to fight period poverty. Details of the […]

The Department for Education’s most senior civil servant has said he wants to build the department’s reputation as “a trustworthy communicator of statistics” after ministers received another slap-down from the stats watchdog. Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary to the DfE, has written to the UK Statistics Authority to promise action to make information provided by […]

Ministers have been accused of leaving “loopholes” in new relationships and sex education guidance after it emerged some Jewish schools were advised by lawyers to show a “united front” to prevent the teaching of LGBT issues. The new guidance, finalised last month, states that that schools are “expected” to teach LGBT content as part of […]

Money handed back to the government by an academy trust that collapsed two years ago must be returned to the schools it abandoned, a Labour MP has said. The Wakefield City Academies Trust (WCAT) has confirmed it gave an undisclosed sum to the Department for Education after ending its latest accounting period with a cash […]