Laura McInerney | Schools Week

Sue Jay, Head of creative arts, Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee School

Rain is lashing down outside the drama studio at the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee School, but inside there’s a cast of storm troopers, a school-uniformed Princess Leia, and Darth Vader (holding a fluffy unicorn), all prepping for Rock Challenge, a fiercely competitive annual dance contest featuring more than 330 schools. Sue Jay, the school’s […]

Teachers shouldn’t fear a robot revolution

Two conferences this week and I got the now obligatory conference-chat about robots at both. Andreas Schleicer, the head of the PISA tests and a perma-attendee at conferences, showed a slide at the Whole Education Conference stating that “the kind of things that are easy to teach are now easy to automate, digitise or outsource”. […]

How schools should handle snow days

Every time an English school is forced to take a day off for bad weather, the usual suspects ooze out of the woodwork and make a fuss about the terrible effects of kids missing lessons. So why don’t we follow what they do in the states, and add a day at the end of July? […]

Helena Marsh, executive principal, Chilford Hundred Education Trust

Helena Marsh is scouring the SSAT conference programme looking for a suitable interview time. She’s one of the opening keynote speakers, wearing a yellow dress that her assistant head said would allow people to recognise her afterwards and ask questions. “It’s worked,” she says with glee. Poring through the events, she is pained at the […]

Toby Salt, Chief executive, AQA

Stag’s Hill in Guildford is an address known to the many secondary teachers who have submitted GCSE coursework to AQA. Its name conjures the image of a royal park full of leaping deer and rolling foliage. In reality, it is located at the University of Surrey, in a building reminiscent of Ikea. The place screams […]

David Benson, Principal, Kensington Aldridge Academy

This isn’t supposed to be a story about Grenfell Tower. It’s supposed to be the story of David Benson, a poster boy for the Teach First mission, who eschewed his high-flying Cambridge-educated family’s vision of him as a lawyer, academic or media guru, and instead worked for over a decade as a teacher in tough […]

Daisy Christodoulou, Director, No More Marking

The Charles Dickens Museum café is a pertinent location to meet Daisy Christodoulou, the author of the enduringly popular Seven Myths of Education, as there’s something about her that feels as if she’s sprung from a Dickens novel. Born in Whitechapel in east London during the recessions of the 1980s, her parents worked on her […]

All aboard the ‘Skills Revolution’! (Even you, Mr Gibb)

“The Conservative Party has got a major problem when its own secretary of state for education is on the stage announcing a ‘skills revolution’, but the schools minister won’t let civil servants write the word ‘skills’ in any of his correspondence.” Making this point while sat alongside a former Tory minister and in front of […]

Chris Jansen, chief executive, Cognita Schools

Cognita Schools is a rare thing: a turnaround private school chain, a phenomenon more commonly discussed in relation to state schools than the independent sector. Back in 2015 it featured in Schools Week for aggressively bankrupting parents in order to claw back fees it was owed; having taken over several small private schools in previous […]