Opinion

Under the guise of investigation, last night’s Channel 4 programme only further stoked the kind of stereotypes that see Gypsy and Traveller children miss out on school, writes Ellie Mulcahy “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding happened and all those children that had [said they were Gypsies] were bullied. My own children were bullied remorselessly.” So […]

Letting our hopes of returning to school get the better of our reasoning about doing it safely only risks putting back the date we can reopen, writes Mary Bousted There has been too much loose talk lately. Yesterday, one MAT CEO wrote in these pages that schools should lead the way out of lockdown and […]

This year’s demise of public exams is forcing a rethink on teacher appraisal and could transform performance management for good, according to the Teacher Development Trust In a year where there will be no exam results and very limited internal data, we have a golden opportunity to redesign our national approach to performance management. A […]

Colin Diamond sets out five lessons from home schooling to help schools support parents to be the best teachers they can be during lockdown Schools responded quickly to the initial implications of lockdown, but as we settle into what is likely to be a protracted period of home learning, new and important questions are coming […]

Keeping students engaged in STEM while schools are shut presents unique challenges. To solve those, Jane Dowden says project-based learning is an idea whose time has come If things are hard for teachers and schools in this crisis, they are certainly no easier for families acclimatising to home learning. As mentioned in these pages last […]

The most disadvantaged students could lose their hard-won offers from competitive institutions if universities are content to rely on this year’s A level grades, writes Jane Cahill Universities must consider whether they can trust the new grade allocations announced last week. It is comforting that higher education institutions have pledged to work with schools during […]

Teacher training is already facing severe challenges because of COVID-19 and reforms due to be implemented this year threaten the sector with a perfect storm, writes Professor David Spendlove As the political parlance goes, you should never let a crisis go to waste. In 2010, in response to the banking crisis, the coalition government launched […]

Closures have revealed the inadequacies of our school system and are causing us to rethink what we value. Are we ready to be the change we want to see? asks Alice Barnard In a matter of weeks the world and our lives as we know them have changed. We’ve seen the call for engineers to […]