Nicky Phillips | Schools Week

Tree project launches in Bristol

All of Bristol’s 36,000 primary pupils are being encouraged to plant at least one tree as part of an international initiative launched by actor and pop star Olivia Newton-John. The city is the first to take part in the One Tree Per Child initiative, launched last Monday. Bristol’s council will cover the cost of the […]

Rebecca Allen, director, Education Datalab

Peer out of the window of Becky Allen’s office and you can see into the expansive gardens of Buckingham Palace. It is a reminder of the vast difference between the lives of the few and the very many. It is a difference that Allen, a one-year teacher, then academic and now director of Education Datalab, […]

Art and music bring pupils together

Two schools in Barnet, north London, joined forces earlier this year to develop the relationships between disabled and non-disabled young people through art and music. A multi-arts programme by the charity Create brought together students from mainstream Whitefield School and Mapledown special school. During January the students worked with artist Daniel Lehan to build sculptures […]

Are your seatbelts fastened?

More than 30 pupils from Kingswood School in Bath learned the sky is the limit when they visited the City of Bath College’s aircraft cabin. The pupils boarded a “flight” to Australia, clutching their hand-made passports and boarding passes, and listened to a safety demonstration before “take-off”. The visit to the college’s travel and tourism […]

‘Shy’ DJ celebrates five years in the limelight

A Doncaster teenager who turned to radio presenting to conquer his shyness is approaching his fifth year in front of the controls. Sixteen-year-old Sam Wilson joined Balby Carr Community Academy in 2009 as a “shy” and “socially awkward” year 7 pupil. But when he was approached to be the school’s radio host, his confidence surged […]

Sikh school revises admissions policy after investigation

A free school has been ordered to “significantly redraft” its admission policies after breaching rules, including asking prospective parents to fill in a religious questionnaire. An Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) investigation ruled that Khalsa Secondary Academy in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, asked parents “unreasonable, unclear, not objective and not fair” questions. The school said […]

Edition 20: Annaliese Briggs, Miriam Fredrickson and Sarah Militello

Pic from left: Annaliese Briggs, Sarah Militello and Miriam Fredrickson Annaliese Briggs has been appointed the new curriculum development manager at Floreat Education. Ms Briggs, 29, joins following a year as a Policy Exchange research fellow. “I thoroughly enjoyed my year,” she says. “As a trained primary school teacher, I was really pleased to be able to focus […]

Term-time breaks don’t always mean poor results, say experts

Claims that children are harmed by short breaks away from school have been questioned by two data experts after the Department for Education (DfE) released figures showing that GCSE and primary school test results were lower for children who missed more lessons. In a press release accompanying the data, the DfE said this “highlights the […]

Purdah puts brakes on help for failing schools

Failing schools will have to meet a “public interest test” before getting government help when purdah kicks in next month. Schools Week understands that civil servants have been told to consider whether intervention risks causing a local controversy that could impact election debates. Purdah is the period before an election where public bodies have to […]