Author: Freddie Whittaker

GCSEs and A-levels should be scrapped and replaced with one “holistic baccalaureate” for 18-year-olds which recognises academic and technical skills and personal development, a senior Conservative MP has said. Robert Halfon, a former skills minister who chairs the parliamentary education committee, wants to mimic the international baccalaureate, which requires pupils to sit subjects from six […]

The government will develop new “benchmarks” for character education against which schools will be required to assess themselves, Damian Hinds has said. The education secretary announced today that he is assembling an “advisory group” to draw up recommendations for developing “character and resilience” in pupils and new character benchmarks to measure performance of schools. He […]

Damian Hinds will today set out his “five foundations” for character education, and pledge to improve access to extra-curricular activities for poorer pupils. The education secretary is concerned that too few disadvantaged children have access to activities that build the “character and resilience” they need to succeed in education. However, the only material pledge expected […]

A single-academy trust has been ordered by the government for a second time to justify the £260,000 annual pay for its head – although the Department for Education admits that it’s powerless to intervene. Lord Agnew, the academies minister, has written to 28 academy trust boards in his crackdown on excessive chief executive pay, urging […]

An English mastery programme “incubated” by one of England’s most prominent multi-academy has been selected for a trial by the Education Endowment Foundation. The EEF will test the approach, which is supported by Ark Ventures, an arm of Ark Schools, in 110 schools over two years to find out if it will boost pupil progress. […]

The Home Office prioritised checks on pupils’ immigration status over helping schools to identify migrant children in need of free school meals, an independent review has found. A report by David Bolt, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, into data-sharing between government departments found communications problems between the Department for Education and Home […]

The chief inspector of schools has backed calls for a shake-up of how exclusions are reported in national data, branding the current system “extremely unhelpful”. Amanda Spielman told the parliamentary education committee this week that it is “completely extraordinary” that the reason given for almost one in five permanent exclusions in official Department for Education […]