Author: Freddie Whittaker

A company which provided school improvement, governor support and other services to hundreds of schools in Buckinghamshire is to go into liquidation, citing changes to national education policy. Trustees of Buckinghamshire Learning Trust have confirmed that the company, formed in 2013 to run certain services outsourced by Buckinghamshire County Council, has ceased trading. Despite exploring […]

The country’s smallest ‘good’-rated primary schools may avoid having new two-day inspections under Ofsted’s proposed inspection framework, one of the watchdog’s directors has said. Matthew Purves, Ofsted’s deputy director for schools, admitted today that the proposal to extend so-called “short inspections” of ‘good’ schools to two days was a “big issue” for small primary schools, […]

Legal challenges by schools over Ofsted judgments are often a “colossal waste of taxpayers’ money”, a senior inspector has said, telling schools to “bring it on”. Matthew Purves, Ofsted’s deputy director for schools, told an event in London today his organisation has “very consciously tried to make sure everything’s judged well and judged once” under […]

The government is considering withdrawing funding for BTECs and other qualifications that “overlap” with A-levels, Damian Hinds has announced. The education secretary has today launched a review of vocational qualifications at level 3 and below, including applied general qualifications, tech levels and technical certificates. Academic qualifications like A-levels and GCSEs will not be reviewed. We […]

A Microsoft researcher who also chairs the group behind the controversial master computing teachers programme has been put in charge of the government’s £84 million new computing education centre. Professor Simon Peyton Jones will chair the National Centre for Computing Education, the Department for Education has announced today. Alongside his work as a principal researcher […]

Ofsted is to launch a secondment programme for middle leaders who want to spend a year working as full-time inspectors, Amanda Spielman has announced. In a speech to the annual conference of school leaders’ union ASCL this afternoon, the chief inspector of schools set out plans for “one-year secondments to Ofsted for middle leaders”, so […]

The chief inspector of schools has sought to reassure headteachers that improving schools will not be penalised under Ofsted’s proposals to ignore in-house data. In her speech to the ASCL conference this afternoon, Amanda Spielman gave school leaders a summary of responses so far to Ofsted’s consultation on its new regime, which is due to […]

The current system of school league tables stigmatises schools and penalises those with the most vulnerable pupils, union leader Geoff Barton has warned. The ASCL general secretary told the union’s annual conference in Birmingham this morning that his organisation is “exploring a new approach to performance tables” in response to concerns from heads about the […]

GCSEs “rub the noses of pupils in disappointment”, the leader of headteachers’ union ASCL will say today, as he calls for changes to an exam system that denies a third of pupils the “dignity” of a qualification. Geoff Barton will address ASCL’s annual conference in Birmingham this morning, hot on the heels of an interim […]