Opinion

As the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) publishes its second Reflecting Realities report, Sonia Thompson reflects on what it will take to make the report’s priorities part of pupils’ daily fare The CLPE’s first Reflecting Realities report last year was ground-breaking. It received a substantial amount of publicity and cemented the term “reflecting […]

Peer review has finally made it on to the political agenda as evidence of its benefits grows, writes Dr Kate Chhatwal, but as politicians catch up, there’s evidence its benefits could go much further than schools alone. Conference season, with a possible snap election around the corner, has brought renewed interest in school improvement and […]

The deeper scandal of Wakefield City Academy Trust is that it could all too easily happen again. All that’s required to avoid this is some scaling up and a bit of legal tidying, says Martin Matthews. So what’s the hold-up? What about the trustees? That is surely one of the key questions raised by the […]

What do teachers in effective primary schools do? It’s a question teachers, teacher trainers, school leaders and policymakers alike would like a clear answer to. Now, research from the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) project, can help to answer it. EPPSE is the UK’s first major study to focus on the effectiveness of […]

The SEND Code of Practice is routinely broken because a number of factors are not being addressed. Simply moving children around the system is not in itself a solution. Recently, the government announced an additional £700 million in high-needs funding, another special educational needs and disabilities review and its intention to expand alternative provision (AP) […]

On Monday around 100 education researchers and users of research gathered at the Royal Statistical Society to celebrate the centenary of the first-ever randomised controlled trial (RCT) in education. It may come as a surprise that the origins of the RCT span at least as far back in education as in medical research. There were […]

Last week we got “the call” in one our trust’s primary schools. The second week of September, a new, untested framework, a re-brokered turnaround school. We were ecstatic, as you might imagine. The school, and the trust overall, were cautiously optimistic. It was time to find out if Ofsted had truly responded to HMCI’s call […]

Promises of more funding will be welcome, but the sector can’t continue using disadvantaged schools as cover for their own irresponsible spending, writes Paul Tarn. Lord Agnew has for some time argued for the sector to make better use of resources, and he’s come under a lot of criticism from the sector for it. I […]