Opinion

Teachers are overworked, undervalued and underpaid and we need to resource them better, says Layla Moran, setting out the Lib Dems’ vision for the school system Some new teachers are barely earning the National Living Wage because they are overworked and underpaid. That was the warning from the NEU’s joint General Secretaries this week. I […]

A new government edtech strategy has been released, but does it stand up to scrutiny? Tony Parkin isn’t convinced… Perhaps I should begin by saying that, having spent my career working in supporting and promoting education and information technology for schools, I am naturally delighted when any government sits up and shows an interest in […]

The promised review of the school admissions system needs to materialise if the government wants to fulfil its social mobility ambitions, says Emily Hunt Each year, thousands of families receive the news they hoped they would avoid: they have failed to secure their first choice of secondary school.  While the majority of families in England […]

For the UK’s LGBT+ educators, these past few weeks have felt like going back in time. But equality is not up for debate, says Matt Hood When I started primary school in 1990 ‘section 28’ as it was known, prevented teachers from ‘promoting homosexuality’ or the ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. By […]

One approach to interest students is to focus lessons on topics they are interested in – but this demands a lot of our time, while undermining the purpose of education: helping students to learn new and hard things that they may only appreciate after they have mastered them. In this column I want to share […]

It’s never too early for children to start thinking about their future ambitions, says Karen Follows Developing an awareness of potential future careers is an important but perhaps often overlooked aspect of teaching in a primary school. Recent research from Teach First and the Education and Employers Charity focused on the importance of getting children […]

School leaders will surely welcome Ofsted’s stated intention to ‘dial down’ the influence that data has on inspection outcomes and the consequent reduction that this will have on workload, but as ever, the devil is in the detail, says Ian Hartwright The draft inspection handbook goes much further than ‘dialling down’.  From September Ofsted proposes […]