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17 April 2026

Author: Laura McInerney

Education is suffering two types of blind spot: can you see them?

There are two types of blind spot: one in your eyes, the other in the world around you. Education is suffering from both. Every eye has a punctum caecum, a small spot at the back of the eyeball that cannot absorb light and so causes a hole in your sight. If you have two eyes, […]

In Case You Missed It: The Top Profile Interviews of 2016

5. Dan Moynihan – Chief Executive of Harris Federation Harris academies have long been a source of intrigue for academy haters and advocates alike. Never having received less than a “good” from Ofsted, no matter how tough the school was when taken over by the organisation, a mythology has risen around Harris and its notoriously […]

Sir David Carter, National Schools Commissioner

It’s been an 11-month wait for an interview with David Carter, the lead kingmaker in the new world of education. Since Schools Week started we’ve tracked the eight regional schools commissioners, civil servants who control all decisions on school and academy trust openings, closures and significant changes. The national commissioner, their leader, is the most […]

School funding, grammars… 2016 has been ridiculous

If someone had said this time last year that by the end of 2016 I would be on the same side as Nicky Morgan and Lucy Powell and we’d all be trying to stop the first completely comprehensively-educated secretary of state from bringing back grammar schools I would have laughed in their face. 2016 has, […]

Speed-read: The really quite important findings of the Post-16 Inequalities Report

Earlier this week a very clear, very useful report was released. And no, it wasn’t PISA. Published on Monday, the ‘social and ethnic inequalities in post-16 choices’ report sounds amazingly dull. But it isn’t. It’s rather great. The first clue it would include gems was that Education Datalab wrote it, on behalf of the Social […]

Nationality data, grammar schools – what’s the real story?

If you’re looking for good assembly material, it’s worth showing pupils the greatest music video of the Nineties: Oasis’s Stand By Me. It shows a series of unconnected events over its five-minute riff. We see people stealing televisions; twin sisters pushing one another; a woman being mugged; a child being kidnapped. Or, at least, that’s […]

The birth (and death) of the school health service

Everyone in England is familiar with the concept of the National Health Service. But have you heard of the School Health Service? A forgotten aspect of the 1944 Education Act is that it laid down duties on local authorities to look after the health of pupils. School medical officers were to be responsible for ensuring […]

Lucy Crehan, author of Cleverlands

Over the next fortnight, education geeks will be wetting themselves with excitement as the results from this year’s World Cleverest Kids competition comes to its climax. TIMSS and PISA are two global studies in which thousands of schools in scores of countries take the same test so the world can work out – in the […]