Opinion

We’re in it for the long haul but special schools are the canary in the coal mine of the school system’s resilience, writes Madelaine Caplin Despite the tiredness, there has been no better sight in the past fortnight than our classrooms being full of children again. We are all delighted to be fully re-open, but […]

Summer exams will come too late to start learning useful lessons from Covid but we don’t have to wait that long, write Natalie Perera and John Moore The Covid-19 pandemic is arguably the biggest post-war challenge this country has faced. While the road to full recovery still seems a long way off, schools up and […]

With the national tutoring programme set to launch soon, a roundtable from earlier this year offers useful insights on making partnerships work effectively for all With students back in school after a year of disruption, teachers have their work cut out for them. Many will be trying to carefully balance the increased need for pastoral […]

The Covid recession presents teacher recruitment with short-term gains but now is not the time to ease off the recruitment and retention strategy, writes Jack Worh Before the pandemic, England’s school system was facing an increasingly severe challenge of training enough teachers to meet the demand caused by growing secondary pupil numbers and high leaving […]

Trying to earn the trust of communities while feeling untrusted by government is a recipe of sleepless nights, writes Alison Peacock I have worked within the teaching profession throughout my entire career, but I have never witnessed the levels of supreme professionalism that I am seeing in our schools and colleges right now. As chief […]

UCL Institute of Education drew on their research network to find out how maths departments were adapting to closures and what they need to do it better. Here’s what they found When schools closed to the majority of pupils earlier this year, the immediate challenge for teachers was how best to enable pupils’ learning to […]

Localism isn’t a problem in itself but the lack of mechanisms for sharing best practice is, writes Toby Greany “Anyone who has recently tried to explain the English education system to overseas visitors will be sharply aware of its startling complexity.” So wrote the Educational Endowment Foundation’s Becky Francis in her foreword to our 2018 […]

The biggest looming crisis in education is at risk of being missed in the frenetic news cycle, writes Eleanor Harrison From August’s algorithm crisis, to the controversy surrounding school reopenings, teachers and pupils have rarely been far from the front pages. But despite the influx of news, there’s a chance that the biggest crisis facing […]

The Teacher Assessment Framework used to mark writing in primary school takes a long time to apply – and isn’t even that reliable, writes Daisy Christodoulou Teachers frequently report that one of the most time-consuming aspects of their job is marking. Given that time at the start of a frantic new year is in especially […]