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21 August 2026

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Opinion

Which accountability measures should schools prioritise?

With the DfE and Ofsted making clashing requirements, Liam Collins is forced to wonder which accountability measures and diktats schools should be prioritising Let us all understand this correctly: the new key stage 4 accountability measure will be the lever that gets schools to enter every pupil into the now infamous five (effectively seven) Ebacc GCSEs. […]

A-levels 2017: School leaders, are your results normal?

A-level results are out, and Ofqual has released its usual series of graphs showing the dips and rises in grades. Each year on results day Ofqual also produces boring-sounding variability charts. It’s a dull name, but the data is important. These charts show how many centres (i.e. schools or colleges) dropped or increased their results […]

A-level results 2017: How Schools Week will report the day and what to look out for

Editor Laura McInerney explains how we are going to report Thursday’s A-level results For the past two A-level results days we focused our attention on secondary modern schools. We did this because readers told us they were sick of newspapers focusing on pupils who get all A*s, and given the last 12 months of grammar-fussing […]

Ignore the rise in school-led teacher training routes – universities are here to stay

The Department for Education’s recent Teacher Training Performance Profiles for 2015/16 prompted inevitable cries in the media of “the end of initial teacher training in universities”. They’re wrong, argues David Spendlove. Once again the DfE’s training figures, which showed an increase in school-led training, are more down to its own creative accounting than any radical […]

Can a school decide to leave an academy trust?

As one regional schools commissioner ponders whether a school can voluntarily quit its multi-academy trust, education consultant Simon Foulkes examines the legal issues Schools occasionally leave one multi-academy trust to join another. They can be rebrokered for a number of reasons: failures of educational performance, management and governance, or those responsible for them might ask […]

Amanda Spielman is right: our schools are too risk averse

Risk-aversion in schools has gone too far, argues Andy Phippen. We need to empower our pupils to manage and mitigate risks themselves. In last week’s Sunday Times, Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector, called for a change in the risk-averse culture in our schools, claiming they have become places where children are so wrapped in cotton […]

We know how to close the attainment gap – but government and schools must commit to it

The answer to closing the attainment gap begins at home, and in helping poverty-stricken parents as much as their children, says Jaine Stannard A report came out last week from the the Education Policy Institute, saying that the educational gap between richest and poorest ‘will take 50 years to close’.  With over four million children in the UK […]

50 years before we have an equitable school system

We’re making slow progress in closing the attainment gap, claims the Education Policy Institute’s Jo Hutchinson, because the picture is far more complex than you’d think The gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has been entrenched in our education system for generations. These gaps become evident in the early years and grow […]