Author: Freddie Whittaker

More than 1,700 teachers and childcare providers were left in limbo as a result of “disproportionate” rules that disqualified them from working because they lived with someone with a criminal record. Over the past two years, Ofsted received hundreds of unnecessary applications for waivers to continue at work after confusing teachers with so-called “disqualification by […]

Leaders and governors at an ‘inadequate’ university technical college were unaware of “significant” weaknesses for years, Ofsted has said. Those in charge of Health Futures UTC, in West Bromwich have been “ineffective since it opened in September 2015”, inspectors said, and have “failed to secure an acceptable standard of education for students over that time”. […]

Bullying – some of it racial – is rife at a university technical college that announced plans to close earlier this week, according to a damning Ofsted report which rated the school ‘inadequate’. UTC@Harbourside, a 14 to 19 school with a vocational focus in Newhaven, East Sussex, broke “too many promises”, inspectors said. It is the […]

A flagship government school building programme underspent by more than 64 per cent 2016-17 and will now not be completed on time, the Department for Education has admitted. The second phase of the priority school building programme, also known as PSBP2, is supposed to rebuild or refurbish buildings at 277 schools by the end of […]

A new specialist maths school will open in Liverpool in 2020, the government has announced. The University of Liverpool Mathematics College will become the third of its kind when it opens in just over two years’ time, attracting substantial extra funding from an £18 million funding pot unveiled by the chancellor last year. A special […]

Schools will no longer have to follow controversial safeguarding rules which caused teachers to be unnecessarily suspended from work. From September, so-called “disqualification by association” rules, which require staff working with young children to apply to Ofsted for a waiver if they live with anyone with spent convictions for certain types of crime, will no longer […]

Ofsted inspectors know that progress scores don’t “paint the whole picture” of school quality, Amanda Spielman has said today, as she rejected accusations of bias against disadvantaged schools. The chief inspector of schools warned delegates at an Education Policy Institute conference that government performance tables do not show “what schools aren’t doing”, and claimed inspectors […]

The government has announced a series of measures to help LGBT pupils in schools, after new statistics revealed that almost one in ten of the most serious incidents of homophobia involved a member of teaching staff. Funding for homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying will be extended, and new guidance for schools on how to support […]

The Department for Education is refusing to name the 16 campaign groups whose responses to the grammar school consultation were discounted from its final analysis. In the responses to 2016’s Schools that work for everyone consultation, which proposed expanding selective schools and changing faith schools admissions, 80 responses from 16 “potential campaigns” were excluded. However, […]