Schools Week Reporter | Schools Week

Blogs of the year 2016

This week, our guest reviewers look back on 2016 and share their top picks from the education blogging world. Harry Fletcher-Wood’s top blogs This year the Learning Scientists take the top slot. Drs Smith, Weinstein, Wooldridge and Kuepper-Tetzel founded the blog, which goes a long way to respond to two perennial challenges: “How […]

Sarah Wild, headteacher, Limpsfield Grange School

Sarah Wild does not want to be known as the crazy lady with the goats. So let me put the record straight: Sarah Wild, headteacher of Limpsfield Grange secondary school in Surrey for autistic girls (of ITV documentary and book-writing fame), does not particularly like goats. In fact, the only reason the school has animals […]

Daventry becomes sixth UTC to announce closure after recruitment problems

Low student numbers will lead to closure of another University Technical College, the sixth to close or announce closure since the project launched five years ago. The trustees of Daventry UTC, a new technologies specialist institution in Northamptonshire, announced yesterday that it would close next August. According to government documents, the government spent more than […]

Schools Week chief reporter John Dickens scoops top CIPR award

Schools Week staff were jokingly cautioned to “pipe down” when chief reporter John Dickens won an outstanding national education journalism award last week. Accepting the gong at the CIPR Education awards, held at The Shard in central London, Dickens was nominated for his investigations into independent school standards, parents unable to pay private school bills, […]

Progress 8 scores could fall after ECDL grade recalibration

Schools that enter large numbers of pupils into a fast-track ICT qualification could see Progress 8 scores drop if Ofqual or the DfE recalibrated grades to reflect more closely how pupils score in other GCSEs, a new analysis has claimed. Education Datalab has investigated the potential impact on Progress 8 in schools that teach the […]

Jarlath O’Brien, headteacher, Carwarden House community school

Ofsted is not something Jarlath O’Brien talks about to his staff, he tells me, as we sip tea in his office, foliage framing our conversation. He goes a little further: “I don’t give a shit about Ofsted, really. They’re nice people and they’ve got a job to do, but they can come to our school […]

Is race the elephant in the staffroom?

Men at the recent WomenEd conference admitted they were scared to talk about gender. Are white people just as scared to talk about race, asks Cath Murray This week, Jon Chaloner writes a column for us about last weekend’s WomenEd “unconference”. One keynote event featured men: the HeforShe panel. There were eight men at the […]

The Gene: An Intimate History

If you’re not a science teacher, you may think this book is not for you. Think again. Whatever your background, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene will make you more connected to medicine, science, history and frankly, the trajectory of human thought. My only caution would be not to recommend it to too many people. Once this […]

SEND reforms: Past, Present and Future

The Children and Families Act came into effect in September 2014, with a revised special educational needs and disability (SEND) code of practice and a programme of implementation until April 2018. But half way through the reform, it has divided opinion to such an extent that two parallel Westminster reviews are underway. So what’s happened […]