Author: Laura McInerney

Here’s some bad news. You know that person you want to be in 2016? The one who eats healthily, has time for family, and achieves their goals? Well, you have almost zero chance of making it. Research suggests that while about half of us make resolutions at the start of a new year: fewer than […]

Over the years I’ve noticed how some words in education become synonymous with certain noises. If invited to talk in front of an audience, I am guaranteed to get a “boo” if I mention Michael Gove (even if I’m saying nice things) or see an entire room smiling if I mention Tim Brighouse (about whom […]

The problem with being in education and reading a book about Michael Gove is that it’s a bit like being in therapy with your abuser. Authors pour over his actions, dispassionately analysing cause or consequence, while I – someone who felt the brunt of his policies as a teacher, and later as a researcher dragged […]

Four years ago I wrote a series of blogs about how to open a free school. Unexpectedly, they became a book, sold very well, and became about the only book advising how to open a free school – which is daft, because I’d only been a teacher for four years when I wrote it and […]

Film: Education select committee retrospective, YouTube Television is democracy at its “ugliest” said Paddy Chayefsky, the American playwright famed for gritty “kitchen sink” dramas. His work recorded the private lives of ordinary people and elevated them to art. By contrast, the education select committee’s video retrospective of its past five years, released this week on […]