Schools Week Reporter | Schools Week

Emma Sheppard, founder, MaternityTeacher PaternityTeacher project

Emma Sheppard is on a mission to make it easier for parents to stay in teaching – and to move into leadership roles – and one way she intends to achieve this is by making it acceptable to bring babies to conferences. There’s pressure on Sheppard on the day we meet. First, I’m showing up […]

Revealed: How Gove was forced to create UTCs

As education secretary, Michael Gove was forced to create university technology colleges by George Osborne and David Cameron, a former senior minister has revealed. David Laws, a Liberal Democrat who served as schools minister in the coalition government from 2012 to 2015, told Schools Week that Gove “never liked” the policy, but had it “imposed” […]

Natasha Porter, CEO, Unlocked Graduates

Teach First is spawning. First there was Frontline, which applied the model to social care, and Think Ahead, focusing on mental health. Then came Police Now. The latest spin-off to get off the ground is Unlocked Graduates, which aims to train up the “brightest, smartest” graduates to work as prison officers for two years, during […]

Jan Dubiel, Head of national and international development, Early Excellence

Specialist early-years training company Early Excellence was famously shafted by the Department for Education in November, in the latest instalment of the baseline assessment debacle. But its head of development doesn’t express rancour – in fact the whole process accidentally thrust his organisation onto the national stage, giving it “quite a strong voice in terms […]

Top 5 nerdy explainers for schools in 2017

You may have noticed: we don’t do fluffy content. It tends to be a bit technical, a bit nerdy, but that’s just who we are. So… here are some explainers of the education terminology readers have been asking about most this year. What’s a strong GCSE pass? In case you missed it, a grade 4 is […]

What schools issues got people riled up in 2017?

2017 has been a year of lively education debate, with policy and grading changes causing quite the kerfuffle among the schools community. Here are some of the most controversial opinions that got people talking this year. We need to ditch Progress 8 Love it or hate it, Progress 8 has been at the centre of […]

Top profile interviews of 2017

Schools Week made it its mission to seek out the most interesting movers and shakers this year, but there are some interviews which stand above the others. So who did the schools community want to read about the most in 2017? 1. The primary-school rebel Number one by a college mile (eight times more popular […]

Blogs of the year 2017

This week, our guest reviewers look back on 2017 and share their top picks from the education blogging world. Jill Berry’s top blogs This year the decision was taken to close the free blogging platform @staffrm, and I want to pay tribute to Peps and Emma McCrea and those who made it possible, […]

Top 10 books of 2017 for teachers and school leaders

The best books 2017 had to offer, chosen by Schools Week features editor, Cath Murray. For visionaries and dreamers 1. When the adults change, everything changes: Seismic shifts in school behaviour By Paul Dix Relationships matter. People matter. As educators, we are not dealing with faceless statistics, we are dealing with brilliant, […]