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17 April 2026

Author: Laura McInerney

The Thirty Years War: My life reporting on education

If you’re ever invited to visit the Department for Education’s swanky building in Westminster, look out for the spiders. Having filled the atrium full of plants, a greenfly problem developed. The solution? Buying in hundreds of spiders. How do I know this? Because it’s one of the tiny, almost insignificant, yet totally insightful and beautiful […]

TIMSS Results? Well, at least the kids are all right. The rest of us however….

While the news headlines have been dominated by how clever (or not) England’s children were revealed to be in this week’s international maths and science league tables, our reporter Jess Staufenberg noticed something different. She noticed that while England’s pupils may not achieve most highly, they nevertheless enjoy school more than children in many high-performing […]

Lucy Kellaway, co-founder, Now Teach

It is a cliché of modern times that awful education policies are followed by a plethora of so-called “open letters” in which sad teachers announce they are flouncing from the profession. “I cannot cope in this terrible job any longer,” they sign-off, pointing fingers as they go. In return, social media goes wild. On Sunday, […]

More schooling won’t stop alt-right thinking

In light of Trump’s win and growing concerns about an “alt-right” agenda both in the States and here (for “alt-right” some use “neo-Nazi”), people are clamouring for education as a solution. “What this all shows is that we need more citizenship lessons in school,” some say. “If only these people were better educated they wouldn’t […]

Man up, Hammond, and show your face to the cameras

I wrote a grumpy thing this week. Twice a year, when the Chancellor announces their budgets in the Commons, Schools Week’s designer and I huddle around a screen to select which photograph will go on the front. In previous years we had lots of choices. George Osborne may not have been a charismatic man, but […]

Louise Holmes, founder, EdCentral

It is the small moments in schools that turn a child’s life. A kind word, the winning of a race, the way a best friend sticks up for you during a fight – or doesn’t. In the case of Louise Holmes, 56, founder of EdCentral, the day her maths teacher humiliated her in front of […]

The 18th century forerunners of the Michaela School model

Last weekend, The Sunday Times published a lengthy article about Michaela, the north London free school that styles itself as “the strictest school” in the country. As one of its teachers tweeted: “When we say strict, we mean strict.” The rights and wrongs of this austere approach are not the concerns of this column. What […]

Grammar schools aren’t from the 1950s, they’re from the Middle Ages

It is very trendy to say that reviving grammar schools would be a return to the 1950s. However, grammar schools are actually a medieval concept. A consequence of the Norman Conquest in 1066 was the growth of merchant trade in England. Slavery was banned, buildings were thrown up, and trading boomed. But the population was […]