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14 November 2026

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Opinion

How can schools better support young parents?

The government recently announced they will be collecting data on pregnant pupils transferred from mainstream to alternative schools from next September. What they do with this data is crucial. New research from Action for Children shows that young people who have become parents by the age of 25 are less likely to have moved into […]

Schools commissioners or local authorities – which is the real ‘middle tier’?

The schools commissioners have morphed into a privileged, parallel middle tier with no discussion on role or accountability, argues Jonathan Crossley-Holland When I first submitted a Freedom of Information request to the DFE on the annual cost of the regional schools commissioners, I believed the figures would clearly indicate, in the absence of policy announcements, […]

3 tips for primary school marketing

Primary schools that proactively market their services can look forward to real dividends, suggest education consultant Christine Bayliss and marketing expert Antonia Chitty As the annual secondary school admissions round draws to a close, the primary process steps up a gear. More and more schools, maintained as well as academies, are realising that maximising intake […]

How to test interventions in the classroom

Don’t get hung up on methodology – good classroom research starts by establishing meaningful, measurable outcomes, explains Dr Lauren Ballaera It’s August in a classroom in west London and eight new teachers are discussing ways they can use education research to improve outcomes for their pupils. All of them are PhDs – mainly mathematicians and […]

What was supposed to be said about Ofsted

* Working out what Ofsted is up to involves dividing woods from trees. Unfortunately, as our editor Laura McInerney learned this week, sometimes that causes splinters…   Oh to be one of those witty social commentators who is always correct. I envy those people. This week, in a bid to deal with a shortage in […]

You can’t compare GCSE maths grade boundaries

The new maths GCSEs were designed to be different from the old A* to G GCSEs, says Cath Jadhav, so you really can’t compare new and old. Over the next two months we will be reporting on various aspects of summer 2017, including official statistics. Our very clear aim, in planning for the first new GCSEs […]

Distance is an unfair criterion for school admission

While parents do engage in school choice, the system of using proximity to determine admission means that some households have negligible chance of admission to the best schools, explain Simon Burgess, Ellen Greaves and Anna Vignoles Parents in England have just made their secondary school choices, and we have carried out some research looking at the […]

Linear GCSEs aren’t about cramming knowledge

The introduction of more rigorous GCSEs has understandably been challenging for teachers. But if they try to teach them in the same way as the old exams, they risk not only doing a disservice to their students but also short-changing themselves, argues Danuta Tomasz For the past two or three years secondary teachers in England […]

School support staff have borne the brunt of funding cuts

Over a thousand parents, teachers, school support staff and head teachers attended the school cuts lobby of Parliament on Tuesday, to bring the message to MPs that 88% of our schools are seriously underfunded. The fantasy that emanates from the Government that there are huge efficiency savings still to be made, and that it is […]