Schools Week Reporter | Schools Week

The Shanghai teacher exchange – was it worth it?

Research released last week on the Shanghai teacher exchange reveals that despite sending 60-plus teachers to and from China every year since 2014 – and supporting them to establish mastery practices in their schools – there has been no improvement to key stage 2 SATs in the first cohort of pupils. The report was commissioned […]

The debate: No excuses v nurture – what’s the best behaviour policy?

Hannah Wilson heads up Aureus School in Didcot, whose strapline is “nurturing hearts and minds”. Stuart Lock runs Bedford Free School, which adopts the “no excuses” approach. We invited them to discuss the differences and similarities in how they manage behaviour. How do you create your behaviour culture? Stuart Lock: We’re very routines- and structures-based. […]

Clive Webster, chief executive, Kent Catholic Schools Partnership

Clive Webster has vivid memories of the day Muhammad Ali visited his family home in Harlesden, a north-west London neighbourhood that he describes as “Afro-Caribbean-Gaelic”, sometime in the mid-1970s. He drops this into the conversation when I ask him the three people – dead or alive – he’d invite to dinner. Ali would be there, […]

AP school opens with just eight pupils

The first alternative provision school to be run in the UK by a major charity that believes in personalising learning for each child is preparing to open in Doncaster – with eight pupils. The Big Picture School, which is based on a philosophy of adapting the environment to each child, is due to receive its […]

Thomas Tallis – The school using inclusion to reduce exclusion

How can schools reduce exclusions? Last year groups from the education select committee to Ofsted to the mainstream press berated schools over bad practice without offering much in the way of solutions or guidance as to what “good or promising” practice (the Department for Education’s new buzz phrase – “best practice” is apparently now banned) […]

Making Kids Cleverer

David Didau’s new book is basically a trad manifesto for closing the advantage gap, whose core argument runs: we should try to make children cleverer because it’s the best bet for improving their welfare. Schools can do this by teaching them a knowledge-rich curriculum full of powerful, culturally useful information, using the principles of cognitive […]

School uses ‘nurture room’ to calm pupils at risk of misbehaviour

Students at Aureus School in Oxfordshire who feel at risk of misbehaving are encouraged to “self-refer” to a nurture room to watch an aquarium or “sit and smell in the darkness”, says Julie Hunter, the school’s deputy headteacher. “To nurture their minds, we need to support them, maybe by giving them that time in a […]

Safeguarding software ‘normalises authoritarian approaches’ in schools – academics

Academics are concerned safeguarding software that allow firms to keep watch on pupils’ activity on computers is “normalising extreme authoritarian approaches” in schools – with worries parents might not know about the “snooping”. It follows tech firm Smoothwall launching a new partnership with company Safeguard Software to provide a service that scoops up data from […]

ACE Schools Trust: The MAT branching into family services

ACE Schools Multi Academy Trust, an alternative provision trust in Devon, is developing a new way to provide wraparound family support to get children out of the “downward spiral” of those who’ve fallen under the radar If you’ve read the recent stories in the media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that alternative provision is a […]