Skip to content
29 April 2026

Author: Jessica Hill

‘You need a sense of pride to turn schools around’

Becks Boomer-Clark recalls pulling into the car park of Oasis Academy Bristol for a job interview as vice principal. It was 2008, and she had been inspired to join the “exciting” academy movement to transform the country’s most broken schools. But she “couldn’t believe” her eyes when she realised staff and pupils had already gone […]

The CEO on a moral mission to make schools inclusive again

Jonny Uttley, chief executive of The Education Alliance (TEAL) academy trust, recently asked his headteachers to write down all they ways they could “game” the progress 8 performance measure. They came up with eight actions – including moving pupils into internal alternative provision and off their roll, and targeting certain pupils for exclusion. Uttley has […]

Quick-fix school buildings hazards that could be next RAAC scandal

Timber rooves held together with ‘glue and panel pins’ and materials that turn to ‘fragile Weetabix’ when wet are ticking timebombs in our school buildings, finds Jessica Hill A swollen national debt, depleted construction force and baby boom after the Second World War made Britain desperate for new ways to build schools cheaply and quickly. […]

Head turned sci fi novelist and teacher trainer Alex Prior

Alex Prior well knows how painful it can be as a headteacher to pour your energy into a school, only for it to be heavily (and to him unfairly) criticised by Ofsted. It happened to him twice, partly because he “never shied away from taking on difficult schools to which more sensible people would have given a wide berth”. […]

Living with RAAC: How one school is still coping with crisis

Nine months after the RAAC crisis hit, the issue no longer dominates the news agenda but its fallout still impacts schools. Jessica Hill visits St Andrew’s Junior School, in the Essex village of Hatfield Peverel, to see the problems first hand The story of what happened to a school at risk of collapse from reinforced […]

Seema Malhotra, Labour’s shadow skills minister

If Labour wins power, it will unleash a “skills revolution” by revamping school curriculums and building more bridges between the worlds of school and work, says Seema Malhotra, the party’s shadow skills minister. More specifically, the party has promised to “modernise” the curriculum to make it “rich and broad, inclusive and innovative”, offering pupils a […]

Rachel Younger, school business leader and NAHT president

This weekend, Rachel Younger will take to the stage in front of hundreds of school leaders as the first president-elect in NAHT’s 127-year history, who is not, and has never been, a headteacher. Given the worsening financial storm in schools, perhaps it’s apt for the union to be fronted by someone with first-hand experience of […]

Oli de Botton, The Careers & Enterprise Company

After putting oracy at the heart of a counter-cultural school that has helped shape Labour’s election offer, 
Oli de Botton is on a mission to transform careers education At a recent parent’s evening, Oli de Botton was told his son’s Year 3 class would be studying oracy this term. He began to well up. And […]