Opinion

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 […]

It seems impossible that nearly 50,000 pupils disappeared from schools last year for no apparent reason. But this is exactly what the Education Policy Institute’s most recent report revealed last week: between 2016 and 2017, one in twelve students didn’t progress from year 10 to 11 in the same state-funded secondary school, for reasons that […]

Schools would be better using their limited edtech resources to help pupils to stay safe and develop as informed citizens, argues Laura Larke As I listened to Damian Hinds announcing the Department for Education’s new educational technology strategy, the question that rattled around in my head was simply “Is this really what we should be […]

Successful ITE curricula are co-designed and co-taught across a partnership, says Jan Rowe Ofsted’s recent attempt to confirm what some in its research division think is wrong with teacher education raises the important issue of curriculum in initial teacher education (ITE). But just as with the curriculum in schools, the risk is that a curriculum […]

There are still too many unexplained exits from schools, at a level that cannot be in the best interests of either schools or pupils, says Jo Hutchinson Children are being pushed around the school system in England on an industrial scale. The number of anecdotal reports of off-rolling has become deafening, and today EPI has […]