JL Dutaut | Schools Week

Profile: Sharon Hague

It’s unlikely that many teachers expect to oversee more than 20,000 people and hundreds of thousands of exam results – but Sharon Hague does just that. The former geography teacher, now senior vice-president of schools at Pearson, spent eight years in classrooms in Hertfordshire and Essex before trying her hand as an examiner to help […]

Penny’s podcasts. 8 October, 2019

Penny Rabiger takes over our ‘blogs of the week’ slot once every half-term to point to the best of the education podcasts We are in Beta Podcast, with Niall Alcock Niall Alcock’s podcast series seeks to find the good news, learning and incredible stories from school leaders. Each week he quizzes them on the twists […]

Teachers are losing their religion and breaking the rules

Teachers are less religious today than they were 50 years ago. In some ways, this is no surprise – the profession’s loss of religion mirrors society. In August the British Attitudes Survey reported a doubling in the past two decades of the number of people who don’t believe in God. According to our recent Teacher […]

Curriculum: Athena vs The Machine by Martin Robinson

Martin Robinson builds on his thought-provoking first book Trivium, arguing that the prime purpose of education is the pursuit of wisdom. But he also warns that the opposite of this approach threatens to dominate: “machine thinking”. This sets the stage for a clash of titans worthy of our Marvel cinematic age. If wisdom is to […]

An early verdict on the new Ofsted framework

Ofsted has been inspecting schools under its new framework for little more than a month. It is probably too early to infer too much, says Alex Ford, but publication of the first batch of reports shows Ofsted’s understanding of curriculum quality in practice – and it isn’t without problems Schools and parents were promised that […]

Changing the educational set menu

As the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) publishes its second Reflecting Realities report, Sonia Thompson reflects on what it will take to make the report’s priorities part of pupils’ daily fare The CLPE’s first Reflecting Realities report last year was ground-breaking. It received a substantial amount of publicity and cemented the term “reflecting […]

Ofsted’s new framework: From watchdog to service dog?

Last week we got “the call” in one our trust’s primary schools. The second week of September, a new, untested framework, a re-brokered turnaround school. We were ecstatic, as you might imagine. The school, and the trust overall, were cautiously optimistic. It was time to find out if Ofsted had truly responded to HMCI’s call […]