Nicky Phillips | Schools Week

Nicky Morgan: Turban incident was a ‘serious error’

A Catholic school teacher who forced two Sikh children to remove their turbans made a “serious error” during a “wholly regrettable” incident, education secretary Nicky Morgan has said in a letter to the Sikh Federation. Ms Morgan wrote to the federation in response to concerns raised about the incident at St Anne’s Catholic School in […]

Devon school with TB infected pupils now “under control”

An investigation into a latent tuberculosis (TB) infection at a school in Devon is coming to an end, Public Health England has announced. The national body has confirmed that almost 200 young people at Teign School in Newton Abbot tested positive during screening carried out in the summer term. The latency of the infection within […]

Labour and Lib Dems threaten to join forces to defeat education bill

The government’s education bill which proposes the mandatory takeover of inadequate schools is likely to face major hurdles in the House of Lords after Labour and the Liberal Democrats have said their peers will work together to amend the plan. But a Conservative spokesperson said the potential collaboration was a ploy for gaining “cheap political […]

Is the teacher shortage real?

One question has plagued the Schools Week office for months: how can every school leader say they are battling a recruitment crisis, and yet we can’t see any statistical evidence of it? Even worse: we can’t see any reason for it. And without that, we haven’t a hope of investigating solutions. So, over the summer […]

EXCLUSIVE: More teachers left to go abroad, than did a university PGCE

More teachers left the country last year to teach in English international schools than qualified to become a teacher through the university PGCE route. Data from International School Consultancy (ISC) Research shows there were about 100,000 full-time teaching staff from Britain in English-medium international schools in 2014-15. That compares to about 82,000 in the previous […]

£10m funding boost for mandarin classes

Thousands more pupils are set to learn Mandarin after George Osborne announced a £10 million funding boost to train more teachers in the language. Currently only 1,000 pupils learn Mandarin, which is taught in only 2 per cent of primary schools and 5 per cent of state-funded secondaries. But during a trip to China this […]

Swindon Academy opens ‘grammar stream’ for 30 pupils

An academy in the south west will test pupils in year 6 to enter a newly-opened “grammar stream” in a bid to address a shortfall in pupil numbers Swindon Academy, run by United Learning, has leafleted 98,000 homes in its catchment area advertising the 30 places it will create from next September for the “most […]

Advancing with the tsars

Since Nicky Morgan took the office of education secretary she has appointed several experts, lovingly named tsars by the headline-writers, and convened a plethora of working groups tasked with creating a specific product. Keeping track of the groups, though, is proving tricky. With at least two delayed, three yet to declare members, and a new […]

David Didau, consultant, blogger and tweeter

David Didau doesn’t think teachers should be quiet in the classroom. In fact he hates the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk. Let’s hope he has no plans to shut up soon. Didau, a former secondary head of English and now an education consultant, is a great communicator as the thousands who follow his blog, “The Learning […]