Author: Jess Staufenberg

The government revoked a £3 million pledge to fix a school’s crumbling building because its leaders refused to join a multi-academy trust. The Education and Skills Funding Agency told Dorcan academy in Swindon it would “no longer qualify” for capital and school improvement cash after it decided it would not join the Excalibur Academies Trust, […]

A council has been accused of trying to discourage schools from applying for Education Health and Care plan for pupils with special educational needs in a letter to heads. A leader at East Sussex council admitted his team wrote to schools telling them to keep EHCPs “under review, to ascertain whether or not the child […]

The number of computing or ICT qualifications sat by pupils fell 45 per cent last summer, prompting academics to warn youngsters are now less likely to access a computing education than before the government’s reforms five years ago. Pupils took about 144,000 fewer qualifications in either the government’s preferred computer science GCSE or other ICT […]

Opportunity areas are suffering from a lack of support from other governmental departments, board representatives have warned MPs. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Work and Pensions must be “proactively” involved in opportunity areas if they are to fulfil their purpose of improved social mobility, the education select committee […]

At least ten private schools are in talks with a school leaders’ union about pulling out of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS), with one major chain already set to move staff out. The potential exodus could leave state schools facing further pension contribution hikes to fill a “black hole” in the scheme. Employer contributions will […]

Changes to the way schools review coursework marks requiring leaders to judge marking consistency have been confirmed by the exams regulator. Ofqual launched a consultation in December, which proposed, among other things, a rule change around reviews of marking to make them “clearer and more effective”. Today, the regulator published its official response to the […]

A major academy trust has slammed the “fundamentally flawed” progress 8 performance measure for punishing schools with challenging cohorts – vowing to publish its own value-added progress scores for parents. The Co-op Academies Trust, which runs 20 schools in the north-west including in some of the country’s most deprived areas, said the performance measure favours […]

Nearly 50,000 pupils in a single year group were removed from school rolls for “unexplained” reasons, a major new study has found. The Education Policy Institute has found one in 12 pupils due to finish secondary school in 2017 (8.1 per cent) were removed from school rolls for reasons that weren’t a permanent exclusion or […]