Author: Jess Staufenberg

Inspectors are still on the lookout for schools attempting to “game” school league tables by entering pupils for “inappropriate” qualifications, a senior Ofsted official has warned. According to Emma Ing, regional director for the east midlands, problems with gaming, whereby schools enter pupils into fast-track qualifications such as the European computer driving licence (ECDL) to boost their […]

School leaders have welcomed calls for the government to reconsider introducing minimum entry requirements for all undergraduate courses, in a bid to stamp out the sharp rise in unconditional offers. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has thrown his weight behind a new report which recommends that the government […]

A single academy trust will have its government funding terminated for good after its only school was plunged into special measures and also left a pupil behind on a school trip. Discovery Learning, which runs the specialist science and technology Discovery School in Newcastle, will have its government funding cut off on 31 August. Janet […]

Pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds and disadvantaged pupils are less likely to gain a place at church schools than their white British counterparts, new research reveals. For the first time, the demographic backgrounds of families and their school choices have been analysed. Researchers at Lancaster University were commissioned by the government to analyse parental school […]

Planned reforms to mental health services do not acknowledge that school itself is a huge cause of poor mental health for young people, pupils have warned. Pupils at three organisations involved in mental health, Young Minds, Youth Access and the National Children’s Bureau, were commissioned by the Department for Health and Social Care to give […]

A Harris primary school held up by ministers as a shining example of academisation “overaided” pupils in their SATs, an investigation has concluded. Pupils at Harris Academy Philip Lane in north London were given too much help in their English reading and maths reasoning SATs papers, the Standards and Testing Agency has decided. Now year […]

Schools are missing out on millions of pounds in pupil premium cash because their poorest children cannot afford British citizenship, Schools Week can exclusively reveal. About 120,000 pupils in the UK are estimated not to have British citizenship despite many of them being born in the country. This is because their parents are not yet […]

CORRECTION, July 3, 2020: Comprehensive Future has informed us the figures provided for this piece are not accurate because they were based on a poorly-worded freedom of information request which they say was misinterpreted by schools. More recent census data released by the Department for Education shows the actual number of pupil premium children on […]