Author: Freddie Whittaker

An extensive survey of hundreds of school leaders and teachers has been published by the government, six months after it was completed. The Department for Education’s school snapshot survey: winter 2017 interviewed 800 senior leaders and 909 classroom teachers between November 6 2017 and January 17 2018. Here are some of the most important findings.   […]

The Department for Education has finally published its “workload reduction toolkit”, the day after most schools broke up for the summer. Ministers had pledged to release the resources – aimed at helping schools reduce unnecessary workload for their teachers – in the spring, but have only just published them this morning. The toolkit, which was […]

Schools have finally been told what they will have to teach in new relationships and sex education lessons, months after guidance was supposed to be published. The publication this week of draft guidance on the new RSE curriculum, which is to include health education when it becomes compulsory in 2020, but which won’t form part […]

Outsourcing firm Capita has refused to say when it first became aware of a computer bug that risks corrupting pupil data across the country. The company quietly announced the error with its school information management system (SIMS) on July 12, the same day it was awarded a £109 million contract to manage primary school tests […]

The government’s new national funding formula will not be rolled out fully until 2021 after ministers delayed its implementation by a year to “support a smooth transition”. The news was buried in analysis of local authorities’ schools block funding formulae, published this evening. The national funding formula officially came into being last September, aimed at […]

The Department for Education spent more than £115 million on free school projects that went on to fail, new data shows. The government has updated its register of capital spending on free schools, which details the acquisition and construction costs for all mainstream free schools, as well as information for university technical colleges and studio […]

Draft statutory guidance on the new relationships and sex education curriculum has finally been published. The 38-page document sets out the things primary and secondary schools will have to teach from September 2020, but also includes some instructions on how the new curriculum should be administered. Here’s what the guidance says schools should do…   […]

It will be up to headteachers to decide whether their pupils can withdraw from sex education in their schools from 2020, Schools Week has learned. Under the new curriculum, parents will have a right to “request” their children be withdrawn from “some or all” of sex education at secondary school, and heads will be advised […]

Michael Dwan, the founder of the controversial Bright Tribe Trust, has apologised for the problems faced by Cumbria’s troubled Whitehaven Academy, but bemoaned a lack of support from the government and some members of the community. In a long statement from the private office of the venture capitalist, “a small number of individuals” were blamed […]