Jessica Hill | Schools Week

AI marking: the answer to poor recruitment or ‘pure snake oil’?

Bot exam markers, robot tutors and AI-written reports are all now being used in schools as they look to ride the tech revolution to slash workload and boost outcomes for pupils. Jessica Hill and Jack Dyson speak to the founders behind some of the products being rolled out in schools… An AI developer is trialling […]

Nicole McCartney, Creative Education Trust

Nicole McCartney is a rare species: someone with lived experience of being permanently excluded from school who has gone on to reach senior heights in the education world. As director of education at Creative Education Trust (CET), she tells her heads to see the challenges some pupils face at home as giving them “superpowers”, and […]

Ex Downing Street, Treasury and DfE advisor Tim Leunig

Tim Leunig is the brains behind some of the biggest education policies of the past decade. He also came up with the furlough scheme, which helped to stop thousands of businesses collapsing during Covid. We meet at Westminster Abbey, where Leunig arrives in a high-vis vest (although he didn’t cycle here). It fits his reputation […]

Can online schools solve the post-Covid attendance crisis?

In total, 22.3 per cent of pupils missed more than one in 10 sessions in the last academic year, roughly double the proportion in 2018-19. Of disadvantaged pupils, nearly two in five are now classed as “persistently absent”. A Centre for Social Justice report this week concluded that Covid has well and truly shattered the […]

‘Someone’s got to do it, so we’re doing it’

Schools are swapping English and maths for lessons in wellbeing, running interventions akin to those used for drug addicts and setting up “zen dens” to tackle pupils’ worsening mental health and get them back into schools. One in four parents cited anxiety or mental health problems as a reason why their child was absent from […]

Sarah Finch, chief executive, Marches Academy Trust

Sarah Finch is used to going beyond the job description in her education career. The chief executive of the Marches Academy Trust, which has 11 schools in Shropshire, remembers being sent door knocking while at Frank F Harrison School in the 1990s to “sell the school to the local community”. The school – now Bloxwich […]

Claire Pannell is taking the law into her trust’s own hands

Claire Pannell reckons she might be the only person in the country with her job title. While many trusts have a director of governance, she can’t find any that also have their own “general counsel” – the joint roles that she fills at Anthem Schools Trust. Maintained schools call on local authority legal departments when […]

Christopher Tribble, Honiton primary

With public services diminishing, schools are being described as the fourth emergency service. But for headteacher Christopher Tribble, that’s true in a literal sense. It is not only his school, Honiton primary on the edge of Dartmoor, that’s going above and beyond to provide services for the community, but he and his “mini-monster truck”. Aside […]

How former footballer Eugene Dwaah is redefining alternative provision

Catching staff from alternative provision (AP) settings smoking weed alongside the young people they were responsible for was a seminal moment for Eugene Dwaah, in what he admits has been a “strange career”. “Staff became their friends, which I suppose [they thought] made it easier to manage their behaviour, as opposed to keeping their boundaries, […]