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15 July 2026

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Opinion

Schools are at the sharp end of rising child poverty

Schools are going to enormous lengths to ensure hard-up children don’t miss out, but funding cuts threaten the subsidies they can provide, warns Josephine Tucker. The Child Poverty Action Group and the National Education Union surveyed more than 900 teachers and school staff about the impact of poverty on children. The findings paint an alarming […]

Schools’ designated mental health leads will need support

A recent green paper suggests a new role in schools to manage mental health– the designated senior lead. Dai Durbridge considers how it might all work Mental health and pupil wellbeing have been in sharper focus over the past few years. Many adults with mental ill-health are likely to have suffered their first mental health […]

How can schools know when to make a CAMHS referral?

There are certain kinds of distress that can be managed by a school before a child is referred to a mental health service, explains Peter Fuggle Distress is not the same as having a mental health issue, but most mental health issues are highly associated with distress. This means it can be hard to tell […]

Schools need more mental health support

School leaders appreciate the government’s new mental health strategy, but without sufficient cash, says Sarah Hannafin, it won’t work School leaders are reporting a serious – and growing – concern for children’s mental health. The demand for professional mental health services has increased in recent years, but funding has plummeted. This means that schools are […]

When it comes to teacher pay, we’re just like monkeys

In 2012, the scientist Frans de Waal revealed how monkeys go berserk if paid unequally for a task. A YouTube video, watched 13 million times, shows a researcher giving two Capuchin monkeys a food treat in return for handing her a pebble. When the first monkey is given a cucumber, he happily eats it. But […]

Is there a school governor recruitment crisis?

There might be a huge surplus of volunteers in London, but rural communities never have enough potential governors, explains Judith Hicks Over a quarter of a million volunteers across England give up their free time to provide strategic leadership at state-funded schools – but this figure is falling, heaping pressure onto serving school governors and […]

Multi-academy trusts: can any benefits be proven?

Karen Wespieser investigates the extent to which the most successful MATs are improving outcomes for children and closing gaps for the most disadvantaged Good research takes time – particularly systems research. There is no point in looking at brand new systems because all you will capture is at best a baseline, and at worst a […]

Let’s put teacher CPD at the heart of school improvement

In an increasingly fragmented system, here’s how one part of the country has taken a joint approach to school improvement, explain Simon Faull and Simon Burgess In England we have a reasonably functional system of school accountability, using school performance tables and Ofsted inspections, which provide outcome and process oversight. While this system is often […]