Nicky Phillips | Schools Week

School Funding Changes: Made Simple

The way in which the Dedicated Schools Grant, one of the main components of school funding, is calculated is changing. The Department for Education says that, for the first time in a decade, funding will be based on pupil characteristics rather than historic levels of spending. With additional guidance recently brought out on this recently, […]

Proposed GCSE RE criteria requires students to study two religions but not worldviews

Pupils will need to study two religions under new criteria for GCSE religious studies, but non-religious worldviews will not be included, a government consultation document has revealed. Launched today by the Department for Education (DfE) the consultation outlines the new subject criteria for the GCSE which will now require pupils to systematically study two religions. […]

GCSE secrets of top six local authorities

Schools in six local authorities have bucked the downward trend of this year’s GCSE results and boosted their results. Provisional results released by the Department for Education (DfE) show a national fall in the attainment of five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. The DfE put this down to tougher GCSE measures which […]

Schools Week editorials

Edition seven editorial Free school sixth-form offer £500 recruitment ‘incentive’ to pupils A proposed sixth-form free school advertising £500 incentives to new pupils is at best questionable, but at worst it’s an uncosted bribe. The ‘academic scholarship’ is not a bursary for materials, travel or meals, typically given to pupils with parents on low incomes. It […]

Tristram Hunt, shadow education secretary

Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt is so tall he has to fold himself like an envelope when crawling into a chair in his Parliament Square office. Surrounded by history books and speaking with a cut-glass accent, his manner lies somewhere between hipster academic and management consultant. His name, voice and academic background aren’t stereotypically “Labour” […]

FEATURED: the new regional schools commissioners

Academy status should not be seen as the preserve of large, urban schools, says Paul Smith, the regional schools commissioner for Lancashire and West Yorkshire. In an interview with Schools Week, Mr Smith said that the rural nature of his region was one of the reasons why relatively few schools in the north-west were academies […]

University-led teacher training should be valued, not derided

The transfer of initial teacher training numbers to the School Direct programme has all the makings of a crisis in future teacher supply There is no doubt that Michael Gove’s reforms to teacher education have left new Education Secretary Nicky Morgan with a dilemma. On the one hand, some of her colleagues still regard university […]

The Weald switches on the power to take chequered flag

Pupils from The Weald School in West Sussex sped to glory in an international car racing competition last week. The school’s two teams in this year’s Greenpower Car Challenge took first and third place after engineering their own electric cars “The Black Bullet” (pictured below) and “The Purple Predator”. Competing against students from countries around […]

Sir Ian meets Chew Valley pupils

Veteran actor and gay activist Sir Ian McKellen discussed gay rights with a group of pupils at a Bristol school in a day that headteacher Mark Mallet said no one “would ever forget”. Sir Ian, whose career includes roles in X Men, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, also talked to Chew Valley School […]