Opinion

Primaries, their teachers and pupils face an unprecedented crisis if things don’t change in 2020, says Robert Campbell. And the most vulnerable will pay first and hardest I spent five months of this year as the Interim Head of a maintained primary school that had been judged ‘requires improvement’ the previous year. This school, like […]

The dictionary of secondary schooling has seen a few new additions in 2019. Helena Marsh catalogues them, and makes some early suggestions for the 2020 edition December marks the final instalment of updates to the Oxford English Dictionary for 2019. While terms such as ‘omnishambles’ and ‘fake news’ have achieved headword status this year, there […]

Schools have been visited by the ghosts or Christmas past, present and future this year, writes Laura McInerney. It’s about time they had their happy ending It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Oh, who are we kidding? This year has been the political pits and there’s no pretending otherwise. […]

It’s been clear since we started in 2014 that Schools Week readers are a political bunch, and it’s always fascinating to get an idea of the personal politics of those who read our paper. This week we polled 373 people on our mailing list to find out how they plan to vote and how much […]

While the study reports that most English 15-year-olds are happy, Dr Angela Donkin says the figures indicate some concerning trends for children’s welfare The OECD’s PISA 2018 results for England were published this week by the Department for Education and NFER. While the study reports that 93 per cent of English 15-year-olds are happy some […]

The development of the Department for Education’s work on “character” doesn’t always fit with the experiences of the most vulnerable children, says Lynsey Burridge Our heroes in popular culture are often children in care. Harry Potter, Batman and Lyra Belacqua all grew up outside their birth families and epitomise what we might imagine “character” to […]

Educators love to talk about role models, but that seldom extends to employing neuro-diverse staff, says Thomas Keaney. To make education truly inclusive, this has to change

Today’s publication of the OECD’s international education league tables are likely to generate excited headlines, but the reality is that the results reveal some worrying trends, writes Joshua Fullard Published today, figures from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that, for the first time, students in the United Kingdom are performing significantly better […]