Author: Pippa Allen-Kinross

Ministers are still deciding whether to investigate a trust that spent £100,000 of cash for building repairs on staff salaries and paid for an employee’s parking ticket – nine months after the misdemeanors surfaced. The Dunham Trust also paid £22,632 to legal firm Eversheds Sutherland for advice which was not provided at cost, while a […]

The Department for Education is facing accusations it “misled Parliament” after denying the existence of preparation plans for a no-deal Brexit that it claimed existed just two months ago. The Education and Skills Funding Agency’s annual report, which is laid before Parliament and was published in July, set out “key issues and risks” facing the […]

Schools have been warned to “consider the implications” of teachers offering or promoting paid tuition after a survey found a quarter of secondary teachers took on private tuition in the last two years. The Sutton Trust’s annual polling of teachers and pupils also shows that two thirds of teachers who have tutored did so after […]

“Excessive” use of restraint, growing violence and “serious” behaviour problems have been uncovered in a damning Ofsted report of a special primary school in Darlington. The report warned pupils “have been unsafe” at Marchbank Free School and criticised leaders for being “unable to account” for what “significant amounts” of funding to support disadvantaged children had […]

Teachers want help from professionals to tackle exclusions rather than undergoing more training, a new survey has found. A survey of 1,500 teachers and school leaders for the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and National Foundation for Educational Research shows half believe referring pupils to specialist mental health professionals and introducing classroom assistants […]

Seventeen free schools that opened last year did not have any on-site sports facilities, the government has admitted. A response to a freedom of information request from the Local Schools Network website has shown that 53 free schools opened in September 2018. Of the 41 that the Department for Education provided information for, 17 had […]

The head of Wakefield City Academies Trust spent £1,500 on a dog pen for his offices as his trust headed towards financial ruin, a new investigation into the failed trust alleges. Former chief executive Mike Ramsay’s computer company also made more than £840,000 from WCAT’s schools during his tenure, despite the academies having £2 million […]

Almost half of the new free schools of the past three years opened in temporary accommodation, with most still not in a permanent home. An investigation by Schools Week has also found Ofsted inspectors are flagging land issues in critical judgments, with one school now in limbo for seven years. Another school, Katherine Warington School in Hertfordshire, […]

Plans for a national computing SCITT have crashed after the government failed to attract any “suitable bids” to run it. Schools Week revealed in March that the Department for Education was seeking organisations with “national reach” to run the computing school-centred initial teacher training programme. The whole thing needs to be re-evaluated, why we have […]