Opinion

Primary-to-secondary transition faces new challenges as a result of the Covid crisis but recent research can help ensure schools make the best of it. Ellie Mulcahy explains Research suggests that most children anticipate transitions in positive terms and successfully navigate them. However, the primary to secondary school transition nonetheless presents a variety of challenges, many […]

As her schools prepare to launch Oak Academy resources amid new routines and new challenges, Jo Southby opens up her lockdown diary

Whatever is in store for education post lockdown, we can be sure that the foundational skills of mindfulness will continue to be as invaluable as ever, say the authors of a new strategy document The interruption of our normal life has made us all acutely aware of the significance of emotional and social needs. It […]

A new report on the state of alternative provision makes for some dire reading but there’s plenty of evidence it doesn’t have to be that way, writes Cath Murray When you want to sell a story about excluded children into the mainstream media, it has to be about how dire their outcomes, or awful the […]

A new report from the Chartered College of Teaching has gathered evidence from around the world and must inform any decision about how schools are reopened, writes Alison Peacock The widespread closures of schools to all but children of key workers and vulnerable children are unprecedented and the impact on our pupils, teachers and schools […]

As schools settle into more sustained use of online learning tools, attention needs to be paid to teachers’ development and resource needs as well as their students’, writes Patrick Roach It now seems like a lifetime ago that the majority of children and young people’s learning took place at school. The speed and scale of […]

Amid all the challenges thrown up by the current pandemic the government may at least win a reprieve from one pre-existing condition, writes Jack Worth Before the coronavirus outbreak, the secondary teacher labour market in England was in a precarious state. The number of secondary teacher trainees required to maintain supply was high and rising […]

Nobody’s asking anyone to clap for teachers but their incredible efforts to reinvent school deserve better than uninformed public criticism, writes Paul Whiteman I am at my desk a bit earlier than normal today; it is not quite light and in the background the farming programme has just started on radio 4. I can take […]

Schools will reopen to a new world. They have earned the nation’s trust and should be supported to shape it, writes Mike Ion The first thing we need to come to terms with when it comes to schools reopening is that it will take time for students, teachers and parents to readjust. Whatever the ‘new […]