Laura McInerney | Schools Week

Can teachers really remember how many hours they’ve worked?

As a psychology A-level teacher, one of my favourite teaching topics was the fallibility of witness testimony. A classic study, devised by Loftus and Palmer in 1974, had 45 students watch films of different traffic accidents and answer questions about it afterwards. The psychologists discovered that the way a question was phrased changed the answers. […]

Teaching out of specialism: does it matter to pupils?

Imagine it’s Monday morning and you are suddenly told you must take a supply lesson. Your teaching subject is geography. Today, however, you will be teaching Urdu. For the few readers among you who speak the language, this may be an exciting moment. For everyone else, it is terrifying. I say this as someone who, […]

GCSE 2018 Variability Charts: Are Your Results Normal?

GCSE results are out. Each year Ofqual produces boring-sounding variability charts. It sounds dull but they show how many centres, i.e. schools or colleges, dropped or increased their results compared with the previous year. This means that if you dropped, say, 25 per cent in one subject, you can see how many other schools also […]

Let’s fix school structures, then we can turn to curriculum

It’s eight years this month since Michael Gove slammed the Academies Act through the Commons and gave us the complicated landscape of academies, free schools and other issues that we all now face. On Tuesday I was asked by the Education Policy Institute to look back across the years and highlight if it was all […]

Without more money, the EHCP dream will become a nightmare

How much does it cost to educate a child? Schools are allocated roughly £5,000 per pupil, depending on location. But is it enough? And, specifically, where is the limit if it isn’t enough? This question particularly matters when thinking about special-needs funding. The new system involves an education, health and care plan (EHCP). Introduced several […]

Sex education reforms: can someone in the DfE give us a straight answer?

In Blackadder: Back and forth, our eponymous antihero runs into Shakespeare after an experiment with a time machine goes awry. “This is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next four hundred years!” Blackadder cries, as he punches the Bard in the face. If I had a time machine, I should like to go back […]

Cheating at key stage 2 SATs: what does it mean for secondary schools?

What if the reason a secondary school had a poor progress rate was not due to its own teaching, but because the pupils arrived with overinflated results from primary school? Researchers at the number-crunching powerhouse Education Datalab believe this theory holds true, after they looked at secondary schools that took pupils from 30 different primary […]

Fixing the madness of the teacher transfer window

Welcome to recruitment silly season! It is the time of year when everyone wanting to move schools has to do so quickly, because resigning after the end of May means there’s no further option for change in 2018, and where headteachers crumble after months-long negotiations to keep a valuable staff member in their job falls […]

When it comes to teacher pay, we’re just like monkeys

In 2012, the scientist Frans de Waal revealed how monkeys go berserk if paid unequally for a task. A YouTube video, watched 13 million times, shows a researcher giving two Capuchin monkeys a food treat in return for handing her a pebble. When the first monkey is given a cucumber, he happily eats it. But […]