Author: Laura McInerney

Gender pay rules are making corporations jittery, and rightly so. As Schools Week recently revealed, academy trusts usually have way more low-paid women than high-paid ones, which causes an imbalance in average pay. Reputationally speaking, this is bad for academy trusts. But for banks, retailers and large consulting firms, the damage is even greater because […]

In a warm marquee tent on Wednesday, I was one of four people debating a motion: “Academic selection is wrong at 11, and it is still wrong at 18.” Having spent the past two years debating the considerable evidence against grammar schools, my arguments on the first part of the debate were sound. But I’ve […]

When did you first decide an academic school subject wasn’t for you? Perhaps it was the day everyone laughed at your French accent? Or when the English teacher made you read Catcher in the rye? (You have my sympathy – that boy needs to get over himself). Mine was in during a physics lesson on […]

Four months ago, Teacher Tapp data revealed that half of teachers had answered emails during the Christmas holidays. This sounds innocuous enough, but the figures caused a bit of a battle on social media. Email answerers were at pains to explain it wasn’t necessary for other people to answer their emails out-of-hours or reply to […]

Are schools going to get more money? That’s the question headteachers keep asking – not least at the ASCL conference last week – and it’s the one that’s guaranteed to cause everyone grief. And quite honestly, the answer appears to be no. Damian Hinds is a classic low-tax Conservative. In his time as a member […]

In marathon races, mile 20 is known as “the wall”, the point when the energy in your muscles runs out and continuing on requires overcoming every psychological instinct to stop. For schools, March is “the wall”. It’s the month when teachers’ good intentions for their class are in tatters and when, if things are going […]

In the summer of 2013, the health secretary was stopped in his tracks. Jeremy Hunt’s decision to close the emergency department at Lewisham Hospital was ruled unlawful. It was a victory for local campaigners but it would also become a parable for the situation in which academies would one day find themselves. I fear that […]