Author: Nicky Phillips

Ofsted is visiting schools across Tower Hamlets in east London to scrutinise pupil attendance data as fears increase over children travelling to Syria to join extremist fighters. Schools Week understands inspectors visited a number of schools in the London borough last week without notice. An Ofsted spokesperson confirmed the visits, stating: “We are undertaking a […]

Schools do not need to do a religious collective worship, a former chair of the national association for SACREs has reminded the sector. Lesley Prior’s comment follows calls to end the required daily act of worship from a group that includes former education secretary Charles Clarke. In a report from Westminster Faith Debates, Mr Clarke […]

Schools will have to find more than 2,000 “missing” teachers to meet the government’s demand for the inclusion of a modern foreign language in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), Schools Week can exclusively reveal. The new qualification requires every secondary pupil to study English, maths, science, history or geography and a modern foreign language (MFL) until […]

Grades that once achieved a pass at GCSE will no longer count for up to a fifth of pupils when the new grading system is introduced, Schools Week can exclusively reveal. Education secretary Nicky Morgan, who announced the new system on Monday, says that once the grades structure has changed, the government will consider a […]

The clocks have stopped at one university technical college in a bid to make pupils more “professional and business-like”. Kate Tague, the principal of Coventry’s WMG Academy, decided not to install clocks in any of the school’s classrooms to create a more realistic working environment. The 14-19 UTC opened in September and is currently 70 […]

More than 70 people, including headteachers, heads of academy chains, education charity bosses and governors, were recognised for their services to education in last Friday’s Queen’s Birthday Honours. Three were made Commanders of the British Empire, 22 Officers of the Order of the British Empire and 35 Members of the Order of the British Empire. […]

Less than half the current “additional inspectors” asked to join Ofsted’s new in-house inspection team made it through the watchdog’s tough new assessment process. Ofsted’s director of schools, Sean Harford, revealed the low pass rate at the Northern Rocks pedagogy conference in Leeds last Saturday during a debate about the inspectorate’s future with Association of […]

Teaching assistants at a special needs school will take industrial action over new contracts forcing them to work an additional 15 days a year with no extra pay. In previous years, Epinay Business and Enterprise School (pictured) in Jarrow, South Tyneside, has run a summer school manned by staff who volunteered for the work and […]

The woman behind the theory of growth mindset says she is kept awake by some teachers misusing it to “make kids feel good about themselves”. Psychologist Carol Dweck (pictured) devised the concept after decades of research on achievement and success. It explains how intelligence can be developed, so that children focus on improvement rather than […]