Nicky Phillips | Schools Week

Private school firm fined for breach of safety law

Schools have been warned about their responsibilities for vetting contractors after a private school operator had to pay out more than £100,000 when a worker was injured cutting down a tree. Alpha Schools was fined £35,000 and ordered to pay £25,000 costs after breaching health and safety laws when an on-site worker was injured by […]

Hunt renews call to scrap GCSEs

Labour needs a “clearer narrative” and fewer “short-term gimmicks” in its education policy, teaching unions have warned after Tristram Hunt said the next party leader must put education “front and centre”. During an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, the shadow education secretary admitted that Labour should have done more to “prioritise” its […]

Poor GCSE results linked with voter support for UKIP

New research that suggests regions with underperforming schools are more likely to have the highest numbers of UKIP voters has sparked heated debate in education’s Twittersphere. But research author Dr Meenakshi Parameshwaran, of think tank LKMco and Education Datalab, says it’s time to wake up to “the uncanny relationship between UKIP voting and education”. “Whatever […]

German pupils swell free school’s roll

– As EU citizens, they’re entitled to be here, says Parkfield school – ‘Increasing numbers at census time is unethical,’ says finance head A free school in the south of England that filled spare places with German students for up to six months has denied recruiting pupils abroad to gain additional funding. But Parkfield school […]

More schools complain about Ofsted

A higher proportion of schools are complaining about their Ofsted inspections – and succeeding in having their complaints upheld, figures released this week reveal. Schools inspectorate Ofsted published its annual accounts and report on Tuesday detailing the number of complaints made by all inspected parties. Between April 2014 and March 2015, it had received 439 […]

Morgan promises to give away any salary boost

MPs are set to receive a 10 per cent pay rise if plans by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority go ahead – but Nicky Morgan says that she will give any increase to charity. The education secretary has said in several broadcast interviews that she will donate any increase, while her office has confirmed that […]

Tim Oates, group director of assessment research and development, Cambridge Assessment

For Tim Oates, a school is not just a school. “It’s not that simple”, insists the research director. “They are a place where these really complex transactions go on – where kids are inducted into the canon of knowledge that’s been carefully accumulated by society. “Thousands of years of knowledge and hundreds of years of […]

How schools can do more to support looked after children

Everyone needs a pushy parent, so why should looked-after children (LAC) be any different? That was the question Matthew Blood, the virtual school head for three West London boroughs, posed at Optimus Education’s conference in Birmingham last month. Blood presented a mixed picture on how well LAC are performing in schools. He, like other virtual […]

Measure teacher quality: not student results

An overreliance on standardised data undermines our efforts to keep schools improving. If we really want to help our pupils then the best thing we can do is make sure that the people educating them also have the chance to keep on learning I recently completed a strategic review for one of the largest academy […]