Author: Nick Linford

Controversial safeguarding rules which caused teachers to be unnecessarily suspended from work could be scrapped, the government has announced. The Department for Education has launched a consultation on disqualification by association rules, which currently require staff working with young children to apply to Ofsted for a waiver if they live with anyone with spent convictions for certain […]

More than 80 free places offered to the government by boarding schools to house and educate unaccompanied Syrian refugees have gone unfilled, it has been revealed. The places, worth an estimated £1.5 million in fees, were made available last September by the Boarding Schools Association (BSA) on behalf of about 50 state and independent boarding schools, […]

Another of the government’s flagship University Technical Colleges has announced plans to close this summer after reporting a lack of financial viability. According to the Burnley Express, UTC Lancashire in Burnley will close in August, just two years after it opened. Government data released earlier this year showed the college had just 113 pupils on its […]

A working baseline test should be introduced for reception pupils and statutory key stage 1 assessment should be “scrapped altogether”, a union leader has said as he warned heads could not “endure another year of chaos”. Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers, told the union’s annual conference in Birmingham today […]

The legal right of parents to pull their children out of religious education should be removed, headteachers have said. The National Association of Headteachers has passed a motion calling for a negotiation with the Department for Education over the legal framework which currently allows parents to remove their children from RE classes. The national curriculum […]

Plans to convert all schools into academies risk creating “boom times for lawyers, auditors and consultants” while teachers struggle, a union leader has said as he called for heads to “spend time in the classroom, not the boardroom”. Less than 24 hours after headteachers took the unexpected step of putting industrial action on the table […]

Headteachers will consider industrial action over a bid to turn all schools into academies after a union passed a motion opposing government plans. A motion against full academisation was amended at the National Association of Headteachers annual conference this afternoon to include a demand that the union’s executive consider industrial action as a “last resort” in the […]

The number of primary schools which fall below government floor standards this year will be in the hundreds rather than the thousands despite harder tests at key stage 2, heads have been assured. Seeking to allay fears that new tougher tests could see tens of thousands of schools deemed to be failing as a result […]

A sexism row has erupted between Nicky Morgan and a headteacher after she was quizzed on the balance of power in her department. The education secretary accused Simon Kidwell, headteacher of Hartford Manor Primary School, of sexism when she was asked if it was in fact Nick Gibb who ran the Department for Education, rather […]