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14 November 2026

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Opinion

Schools and their pupils are clear – no one is an outsider

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 […]

How do you make teenagers care about learning?

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 […]

How to teach gender-blind careers education in primary

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 […]

Exclusion or poor mental health: which comes first?

Children excluded from school are more likely to have poor mental health than their peers, but the direction of causality is hotly debated, says Tamsin Ford How much can and should we do to prevent exclusions? How do we balance the needs of the student who struggles to cope in school with those of their […]

Don’t ditch internal data in inspections

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 […]

No to cost-cutting, yes to optimisation

There is an important distinction between efficiency in the context of austerity and the optimisation of available resources, says Stephen Morales The role of the school business leader is to work with the resources that are available and to make sure they stretch as far as possible in the interests of the learning community that […]

Improving the oral language skills of disadvantaged pupils

One barrier common to disadvantaged pupils across our trust is poor oral language and communication skills on entry. Aspirer Research School is based within a multi-academy trust of ten primary schools across the northwest (most with above-average proportions of disadvantaged pupils). We use a range of diagnostic tools to assess pupils’ language skills, including Wellcomm […]

These children need more than a system of escalating consequences

Ofsted’s new framework must recognise the enormous hurdles that some children have to overcome – and inspectors must make sure that funding to support them is used in the right way, says Becky White At three years old, Jade* often ate until she was sick. In between meals, she sneaked other people’s leftovers out of […]

Secondary moderns can be really great schools too

“High scores” in school accountability measures does not always mean that grammars are better schools, says Ian Widdows The grammar school debate inevitably triggers passionate responses on both sides. But many of the arguments put forward share a common factor – an assumption that grammar schools are “superior” to their non-selective, secondary modern neighbours. A […]