Author: Nick Linford

The Department for Education is hoping a new TV advert will help with teacher recruitment. The advert, released today online and due to air over the coming weeks during shows such as Jonathan Ross on ITV, Channel 4’s Gogglebox and drama NCIS on Channel 5, opens with the question “what does a good teacher make these […]

Groups of schools and academy trusts can bid for funding to improve careers advice in their areas, the government’s new Careers and Enterprise Company has confirmed. Following the announcement of a £5m fund which will be distributed in the form of grants to various organisations, the Company has confirmed that any “network, coalition or multi-academy trust” made […]

More flexibility on term-time holidays could result in pupils missing lessons on long division or Newton’s Third Law, Nick Gibb has warned. Responding to a debate on term time holidays secured as a result of a 120,000-name petition calling for an allowance of up to two weeks during term time each year in which holidays […]

Insufficient development of spelling, punctuation and grammar teaching is “slowing down” children when they get to secondary school, Sir Michael Wilshaw has warned. In the first of a series of regular commentaries on areas of education policy, Ofsted’s chief inspector described the “tragedy” for young people and an “enormous waste of talent” caused by good […]

Nicky Morgan and her ministerial team just faced questions in the House of Commons. Here’s what we learned from their responses…   1. There is no teacher shortage In response to a question from Labour’s Stephen Timms about government figures regularly used by the party to raise concerns about teacher numbers, schools minister Nick Gibb said […]

Schools are still insisting parents buy uniforms from exclusively appointed suppliers, despite government advice and a letter from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) urging against it. Schools Week asked the 20 largest multi-academy trusts (MATs) to provide details on their uniform policies but almost all remained silent. However, online searches revealed that some academies […]

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. This is the message from local authorities in which GCSE results improved this summer. Last year, Schools Week reported how just six local authorities (LAs) bucked the downward trend. There was more stability this year with about a third of authorities managing to better their results. Provisional figures released by the Department […]

Stories about suicide should not be used in school anti-bullying campaigns because they risk giving a message to children that “there is a way out”, warns a leading psychologist. Dr Helene Guldberg, the founder of the online current affairs magazine Spiked and author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, told […]

GCSE results have dropped over the past two years in more than two in three established sponsor-led academies. Analysis of provisional GCSE performance data released last week shows scores have fallen in more than 70 per cent of sponsor-led academies that posted GCSE results in 2013, despite the national average increasing by 0.2 per cent. […]