Author: Jess Staufenberg

Ofsted now has the power to inspect all Steiner schools after the chief inspector called for a “thorough examination” into “deeply concerning” failures. Amanda Spielman wrote to Damian Hinds, the education secretary, on Thursday after snap inspections of nine Steiner schools – state and private – found six were “inadequate” and three “requires improvement”. Senior […]

The education secretary has met with representatives of all major religions today in a new push to encourage them to convert their schools into academies. Damian Hinds met with representatives from the Church of England, Catholic Church, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish and Hindu faiths, and Methodist Church today to lay out the “benefits” of becoming an […]

A guru on the knowledge-rich curriculum has warned schools minister Nick Gibb that unless he ensures schools get resources to implement it, the end result could be “worse than it was before”. Michael Young, professor of education at the Institute for Education, also accused the schools minister of just picking out “individual” school success stories […]

Chief inspector Amanda Spielman has denied accusations that Ofsted are “dictating” school curriculums by stating they should be aiming to meet national targets for pupils to take the EBacc. Schools should have regard to the government’s national target that 90 per cent of pupils sit the EBacc GCSEs by 2025, but are “free to design” […]

A headteacher is reducing the number of special needs pupils she accepts in a bid to balance the books after a government funding warning. Julia Maunder, head of Thomas Keble secondary academy in Gloucestershire, a single-academy trust, says she was left with no other choice when the trust was given a financial notice this month. […]

More special education free schools are set to open in 2020 than in the previous five years combined, with almost a quarter focusing on social and emotional needs for the first time. Thirty-four special free schools are due to open in 2020-21, compared with just 32 in the period from 2015-20, data from the pro-free […]

The Department for Education is set to improve its digital services for schools from next month under a new £560,000 scheme, as heads face time-consuming battles to submit data because portals keep crashing. Processes such as data collection from schools, applying for a teaching vacancy, for a school place or for free school meals’ eligibility […]

A flagship government exchange programme which sent teachers to China to learn about the “maths mastery” approach did not clearly improve pupil outcomes, an evaluation report has revealed. Researchers found “inconclusive evidence” that schools involved in the mathematics teacher exchange with Shanghai saw any improvement in their key stage 2 results. The findings, released today, […]

Exam boards will be free to choose how to assess pupils’ programming skills in the computer science GCSE from 2022 onwards, Ofqual has confirmed today. The practical coursework element of the qualification was removed for pupils taking their exams from 2018 to 2020, after tasks from the test were leaked online and downloaded “thousands of times” in […]