Laura McInerney | Schools Week

Flagship free school principal jailed for fraud

The principal of a flagship free school has been jailed for five years for his part in defrauding the government out of £69,000. Sajid Husain Raza, his sister Shabana Hussain, also a teacher at the school, and the school’s former financial director, Daud Khan, were previously convicted by jury of a total of ten charges […]

Heathrow UTC hit with financial notice to improve after ‘loss of control’

The Heathrow Aviation Engineering University Technical College has been issued with a financial notice to improve by the Education Funding Agency, due to an “apparent loss of financial control”. The UTC, which opened in North London in September 2014, failed to balance its budget and suffered cash flow problems since 2015, according to a letter […]

Angela Rayner: Full text of Labour Conference 2016 speech

Conference, it is an honour for me to stand before you today as Shadow Secretary of State for Education. To some, it is a surprise. Some Tories look down their noses at me because, as you can hear, I wasn’t born with a plum in my mouth. I get snobbery too from some pundits […]

Mary Bousted, general secretary of ATL and TUC president

Mary Bousted is sitting in her central London office near Trafalgar Square and quibbling with my first question. “It’s funny you say I’m strident, because that’s not how I feel. “It’s simply that it has always been apparent to me that the direction of travel set in train by Michael Gove would come unravelled. And […]

School are not mini-immigration offices – and never should be

Schools should not make parents show their children’s passports. For anything. That’s a really simple rule. It’s also a rule the Department for Education won’t write that clearly. I don’t know why. But it should. So let us be clear. Schools have no right to make parents show a passport. Schools do not need to […]

Former Gove advisor wants to defeat ‘garbage’ grammar schools policy

This was not your usual anti-government opposition. “How do we defeat this pile of garbage in parliament?” Sam Freedman, the former adviser to Michael Gove, said to delegates as he pumped his fist. The session “How to win the argument against opening new grammar schools” featured a coalition of education community members presenting their views […]

Why grammars are a five-sided dice trick

A jumbo five-sided dice is due to land at the Schools Week towers this week. It is smooth, blue, an odd triangular shape, with faces only showing numbers 1 through 5. It’s my “grammar school gamble” dice. The game is easy to play. Imagine you are the parent of a child in the last year […]

The utopian origins of comprehensive schools

The first in a weekly series of columns looking into the archives of education and using the past to make our readers smarter History is not useful. Whatever else the past is, it’s gone. Actually, that’s a lie. It’s the sort of thing I like to say to rile up historians, and watch as their […]

There’s more to worry about than grammars

Spending the summer worrying about the return of grammar schools is like worrying the NHS is about to reintroduce frontal lobotomies. Lobotomies, like grammars, were a miracle cure of the 1940s. At their peak more than 1,000 people a year had metal spikes pushed into their skulls, swished around, and withdrawn, in the belief that […]