Author: Freddie Whittaker

Two studio schools in Stoke-on-Trent will close by next summer amid dire problems with recruiting students. Stoke-on-Trent Studio College for Construction and the Built Environment (CaBE) will close this August, while its sister college for Manufacturing and Design Excellence (MaDE) will close the following year. These are the 25th and 26th of this type of […]

The Rye Studio School in East Sussex will close this summer after it failed to recruit even half of the pupils it needed. It is the 24th studio school – 14-to-19 institutions with a vocational curriculum – to close or announce plans to close since the inception of the project. According to trustees, the school […]

Professional workers will be asked to “play their part” to improve the education of children by signing up to be school governors and trustees. The education secretary Damian Hinds will use his speech to the annual conference of the National Governance Association for a “call to arms” to “businesses and skilled professionals” to get more […]

A leading academic and a renowned classicist are at the top the list of those recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for their services to education. Chris Husbands, the vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University and a former director of the UCL Institute of Education, has been knighted, while Mary Beard, professor of classics at the […]

A free school linked to a former premier league football club had a deficit of more than £380,000 when it shut its doors, accounts reveal. Bolton Wanderers Free School closed last summer, less than three years after it opened. It had been branded ‘inadequate’ in all areas by Ofsted in a 2016 report which described a “culture of low aspirations”. Last […]

The education secretary has visited more than twice as many academies and free schools than maintained ones – and just one special school – in the first four months of his job. Details of Damian Hinds’ visits were released to Schools Week as part of a Freedom of Information request. Between January and the end […]

The controversial Perry Beeches academy trust had a £1.5 million deficit in the year before it was wound up, it has been revealed. According to its latest accounts, the now-defunct Birmingham trust managed to reduce the deficit across its schools from £2.5 million in August 2016, but still had a £1.5 million shortfall last summer. […]

Eight of the nine schools run by the Essex-based Collaborative Academies Trust are to be moved to new sponsors. In March, local media reported that the trust, set up by the American for-profit school improvement company Edison Learning, will walk away from five schools in Somerset this summer. Now Schools Week has learned that the […]

The collapsed construction firm Carillion made profits of up to 15 per cent on its work for schools in England. The firm reported revenues of £79 million for its education activities in England in 2016, and made much larger profits on its work in 312 schools than it did for its central government contracts, according […]