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14 November 2026

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Opinion

Here’s how exclusions accountability could work …

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 . . .” […]

Turnaround school leaders must be able to exclude to keep pupils safe

There is much to admire about Edward Timpson’s review of school exclusions, starting with his clear statement that schools must be calm and safe places, with strong behaviour cultures. Every parent wants their child to go to a school that is safe and where learning can take place in an orderly environment. Parents should not […]

How partnership working will work…and why it could fail

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 […]

How to make collaborative learning worthwhile

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 […]

There are no easy answers to school refusal

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 […]

Top tips for managing transport in schools

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 […]

Ofsted’s evidence is so unfounded that their case for retaining grades collapses

Ofsted’s defence of its four-point grading scheme in its recent paper (Retaining the current grading system in education, April 2019) has two, but only two, positive features. First, it acknowledges that there are strong arguments against its use of these grades.  Second, it admits that “we have never directly asked (parents) about the four-point grading […]

Which types of school are more likely to off-roll students?

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 […]

Who needs coding when it’s pupil safety that matters?

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 […]