Opinion

In their 2017 report Early Language Development: needs, provision, and intervention for preschool children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, James Law et al wrote:  “A child’s ability to put words together may be a better predictor of later abilities than the number of words they know.” The implication is that if we want to enhance a […]

Katy Theobald went to the other side of the world to learn about innovative education systems. What she found was innovative schools… Educators have been working hard in the past decade to meet the increasing expectations set for them by government. Whether it was the shift from levels to expected standards at key stage 2, […]

The Timpson review is an attempt to address a small but significant issue; the pretence of school improvement through cohort change with a consequential negative impact on children and young people’s life chances.  Recommendation 14 reads, “DfE should make schools responsible for the children they exclude and accountable for their educational outcomes . . .” […]

In the nine years Nick Gibb has been minister for schools (under one guise or another), we’ve seen a plethora of government reports on the state-funded education settings known as alternative provision. We’ve had the Charlie Taylor review of alternative provision, the School exclusion trial evaluation, the Alternative provision market analysis and the Investigative research […]

Everything that teachers do has a cost, a benefit, and (ideally) a valuable balance between the two. Often that cost is class or preparation time — a resource that always seems to be scarce — the benefit, student learning. But there are other indirect benefits that can come from many activities. Given this, we naturally […]

School refusal may be a little more understood that when it was identified in the 1930s, but we still haven’t come up with any effective or pragmatic solutions, says Fran Morgan I didn’t choose to be an expert on school refusal; it chose me. When our daughter refused to go to primary school our main […]

Transport safety in schools is about a lot more than an annual service of the school minibus, says Surekha Gollapudi In December 2014, a 15-year-old boy died after being struck by a minibus when he was crossing a road outside school to board his bus home. Bridgend council was later fined £300,000 for its failure […]