Laura McInerney | Schools Week

A-levels 2017: School leaders, are your results normal?

A-level results are out, and Ofqual has released its usual series of graphs showing the dips and rises in grades. Each year on results day Ofqual also produces boring-sounding variability charts. It’s a dull name, but the data is important. These charts show how many centres (i.e. schools or colleges) dropped or increased their results […]

A-levels 2017: 4 Key Trends From The National Data

A-level results are out! Here’s what we know… 1. Overall performance in England The proportion of A* and A grades has increased by 0.4 percentage points, which is the first hike since 2011. This year 26.2 per cent of grades were an A or A*, compared with 25.8 per cent last year. On the […]

A-level results 2017: How Schools Week will report the day and what to look out for

Editor Laura McInerney explains how we are going to report Thursday’s A-level results For the past two A-level results days we focused our attention on secondary modern schools. We did this because readers told us they were sick of newspapers focusing on pupils who get all A*s, and given the last 12 months of grammar-fussing […]

Is extending school hours a good idea? Here’s what the new government research says…

New government research reveals pupil and teacher attitudes towards a longer school day. Did they say what you expected? Last year, when he was still Chancellor, George Osborne announced a quarter of secondary schools would receive cash to operate for longer hours. It was all part of a plan by former education secretary Nicky Morgan […]

Three stars and a wish: my end-of-year report card for the DfE

I know “feedback” is a contentious issue these days – what with triple marking, and lollipop sticks, and everyone going crazy about exam mark schemes. But there’s something I still love about the simple “three stars and a wish” format I was taught in teacher training. Three good things, one thing that could be better. […]

New Ofsted chief sets out her battle plans

Amanda Spielman is starting to warm up in her role at Ofsted and it is exciting, if slightly alarming, to watch. Her inspector’s focus on curriculum is correct and difficult. Correct because schools have started to concentrate too much on exams. Primary pupils spend most of their final year learning the contrived version of English […]

Amanda Spielman, chief inspector, Ofsted

When Amanda Spielman told a packed audience at the Festival of Education that she aspired to be like Bismarck, it was hoped that the chief inspector meant Otto von, the iron chancellor who unified 19th-century Germany through diplomacy, rather than the battleship that was fatally damaged on its first offensive operation. In her first speech […]

High-attaining poorer pupils are underperforming at sponsored academies, new study finds

An annual report on the performance of academy chains has revealed that five groups – Aspirations, City of London, Diocese of London, Harris and Outwood Grange – performed well above average on progress measures for disadvantaged pupils. But of the 48 academy chains included in this year’s report, only eight saw poorer pupils with high […]

Chain Effects 2017: Which academy trusts are well above average?

This year’s fourth Chain Effects annual report has been released today. It looks at the exam results of disadvantaged pupils in multi-academy trusts (‘chains’) which have at least two sponsored academies (three for primary) and have operated the schools, continuously, since 2016. In total 48 multi-academy trusts counted in the sample. Outcomes were analysed by the […]