Skip to content
25 April 2026

Become a member today for unlimited access to Schools Week

Enjoy expert journalism on schools policy with fewer ads and exclusive benefits
subscribe

Opinion

Why grammars are a five-sided dice trick

A jumbo five-sided dice is due to land at the Schools Week towers this week. It is smooth, blue, an odd triangular shape, with faces only showing numbers 1 through 5. It’s my “grammar school gamble” dice. The game is easy to play. Imagine you are the parent of a child in the last year […]

The utopian origins of comprehensive schools

The first in a weekly series of columns looking into the archives of education and using the past to make our readers smarter History is not useful. Whatever else the past is, it’s gone. Actually, that’s a lie. It’s the sort of thing I like to say to rile up historians, and watch as their […]

Teacher transfer window: Why can’t we fill our vacancies 365-days-a-year?

The idiosyncratic “teacher transfer windows” model is failing schools and teachers. Notice periods for teachers should come into line with those of the private sector, says Frank Norris. The football transfer window, an agreed period of time when players can transfer from one club to another, has closed for another four months. These two artificial […]

10 ways to make workload less of a challenge

Russell Hobby and Professor Toby Salt explore what more the government can do about teacher workload and what practical steps teachers and senior leaders can take to lessen the load. Despite good intentions and warm words, teacher workload is not under control. Agencies such as Ofsted do their best to tackle myths about expectations, like […]

Small schools should keep meals subsidy until national funding formula comes in

After a leaked report revealed the DfE knew small schools needed extra funds to provide free meals – yet still ended their subsidy – Barbara Taylor issues a fair-funding challenge to government Following a successful initiative giving free fruit to infants, the concept of free infant school meals, providing healthy, nourishing food at lunchtime, was […]

There’s more to worry about than grammars

Spending the summer worrying about the return of grammar schools is like worrying the NHS is about to reintroduce frontal lobotomies. Lobotomies, like grammars, were a miracle cure of the 1940s. At their peak more than 1,000 people a year had metal spikes pushed into their skulls, swished around, and withdrawn, in the belief that […]

Theresa May should take a look in the mirror on grammar schools

Theresa May’s policy to expand academic selection by allowing grammar schools to expand and other schools to select some of their pupils is an exercise in Orwellian double think. On the Radio 4 Today programme this morning Justine Greening tied herself up in knots trying to argue that grammar schools represented increased choice, an argument […]

Our LA is quite ‘hands-off’ anyway, so what freedoms would academy conversion bring?

We don’t currently understand the freedoms that converting might give us – what additional freedoms are there? We’re pretty much left to do what we want at the moment anyway as our local authority is quite ‘hands-off’, so what will the difference be? Christine says: I’m not surprised you don’t understand the ‘freedoms’ that converting might bring, […]

Can church schools become stand-alone academies?

Question: Is the memorandum of understanding between the Department for Education and the Church of England/Catholic Church a legally binding document?  Can church schools become stand-alone academies or do they have to become part of a diocesan-led trust? Victoria says: In order to answer the above, we need to look first at how a church school […]