Laura McInerney | Schools Week

The history of education white papers

We now await the government’s grammar school white paper. There is a tussle of views: will it be before the pre-election campaign period starts or will ministers wait until after Article 50 and the union conferences? (Or, perhaps, will they use those two as cover and slip it out in the middle, thus proving they […]

Who started the Association of School and College Leaders?

Geoff Barton has emerged as victor in the battle for the coveted general secretary post at the Association of School and College Leaders. He takes over from interim general secretary Malcolm Trobe, who took over from Brian Lightman, who took over from John Dunford. In a world where we increasingly worry about women’s place in […]

Profile: John Roberts, chief executive, Edapt

John Roberts’s Instagram feed is enough to make the average person sick. Not only does the 32-year-old spend what seems an impossible amount of time atop mountains, his fitness is so equally peaked that one recent video on social media shows him doing more than 20 press-ups with a child kneeling on his back. Still, […]

Words are all we have – let’s choose them carefully

In a bid to recover some of the optimism of the 1990s, I’ve been listening to Boyzone this week. (You can judge, I don’t care, they’re great.) Their 1996 cover of the BeeGee’s Words was a particularly apt soundtrack for something I saw during my daily morning perusal of the Department for Education’s job listings. […]

Despite popular belief, boxing has never actually been banned in schools

Last week, Sir Michael Wilshaw sent a stern letter to headteachers who failed to stop a mass fight among pupils at their four schools. The leaders ought to have got wind of the event and intervened, he said. It wasn’t always this way though; at one point in time schools literally taught children how to […]

Tuesday Humby, principal, Ormiston Chadwick academy

Never in a month of Tuesdays did I think Bankfield, a comprehensive in my home town and well-known as “the dodgy school”, would become a turnaround success. When it went into special measures two years ago I advised local councillors to raze it the ground. But it didn’t take a month of Tuesdays to resolve […]

Beware the tightrope-walker’s error: it can get to us all

One summer day in 1974, Phillippe Petit walked on a high-wire 400 metres (1,350 feet) above New York City on a cable running between the Twin Tower buildings. He fumbled in his last moments, but lived to tell the tale having been made aware that tightrope walkers often fall in their last few steps. In […]

Academy trusts should ‘exchange’ back office services

Shared services are logical, Marcus Robinson, a partner at professional services firm PwC told delegates at the 2nd annual MAT summit. “But they typically fall down because most people, and most organisations, are happy for others to share their services but aren’t prepared to go and share from others.” As schools face squeezed budgets, shared […]

Education can make you (and me) sick, says David Blunkett

The stress of working in education can make people ill, former education secretary David Blunkett told academy leaders this week, as he recounted how a fear of union conferences contributed to his own physical battles. Speaking at the MAT Summit 2016 in Windsor, run by Optimus, Blunkett (pictured) said that he was surprised when he […]