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15 July 2026

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Opinion

How should schools manage out-of-hours emails?

Four months ago, Teacher Tapp data revealed that half of teachers had answered emails during the Christmas holidays. This sounds innocuous enough, but the figures caused a bit of a battle on social media. Email answerers were at pains to explain it wasn’t necessary for other people to answer their emails out-of-hours or reply to […]

Virtual schools: beware ‘mission creep’

Guidance for virtual school heads was updated recently to expand their statutory duties to include previously looked-after children. Sally Kelly welcomes the changes, but warns of mission creep and funding shortfalls I have been a virtual school head (VSH) for seven years now. This revelation used to draw strange looks, but most people, especially in […]

Cheating at key stage 2 SATs: what does it mean for secondary schools?

What if the reason a secondary school had a poor progress rate was not due to its own teaching, but because the pupils arrived with overinflated results from primary school? Researchers at the number-crunching powerhouse Education Datalab believe this theory holds true, after they looked at secondary schools that took pupils from 30 different primary […]

Educational disadvantage: how does England compare?

We know there’s work to do with the disadvantage gap in this country – but where do we stand on the international scale, asks Natalie Perera? The gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers is the leading measure used by policymakers to gauge the state of educational inequality in England. Organisations such as […]

How to lead a successful multi-academy trust

There are lots of ways MATs can improve their schools, writes James Toop, but there’s one common factor needed to underpin it all School improvement can only occur with great leadership. This is especially true when we are talking about groups of schools like multi-academy trusts, but the more I learn about the MATs that […]

How schools and communities can work together more closely

Schools urgently need more funding, but they also need more scope to mould pupils into better-rounded members of society, writes Fiona Carnie It is at last becoming clear to the general public that schools are in crisis. Budget cuts are taking their toll and there is talk that education may be a decisive factor in […]

Grade predictions are unreliable – so why do we still use them?

Too many school leaders rely on having their teachers make predictions about pupils’ grades – but no-one’s any good at it, explains Ben White We recently launched a ‘grade predictions challenge’, offering a bottle of sparkling wine to teachers who could accurately predict 80 per cent of the A-level results of a class. We provided […]

3 ways in which government needs to help school governors

School governance is a vital but oft-forgotten aspect of the school system. Here Mike Parker lays out what he reckons needs to change “Governors are the unsung heroes of schools”, were the opening words of Belita Scott, an inspector, at the SCHOOLS NorthEast event in south Tyneside last September. We are increasingly concerned about the […]

Fixing the madness of the teacher transfer window

Welcome to recruitment silly season! It is the time of year when everyone wanting to move schools has to do so quickly, because resigning after the end of May means there’s no further option for change in 2018, and where headteachers crumble after months-long negotiations to keep a valuable staff member in their job falls […]