Opinion | Schools Week

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Pupil wellbeing and academic attainment? You can have both…

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7d | Opinion

It is not wrong to pursue higher attainment, but research suggests that it’s how you go about it that matters

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7d | Opinion
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Burnham may put on a hard hat, but academia still rules

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7d | Opinion

A careers service in flux will make it harder for students to find well-resourced help

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7d | Opinion
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The best schools have autonomy – don’t take it away

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2w | Opinion

Devolution needs to empower schools, not give them another layer of bureaucracy

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Get reading right to boost white working class outcomes

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2w | Opinion

We won’t improve outcomes for white disadvantaged pupils unless we take reading fluency seriously

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We need a more ethnically representative teaching workforce

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2w | The Research Leader

Overall, there are fewer ethnic minority teachers in England, as a proportion, than ethnic minority pupils

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2w | The Research Leader

The big topics for headteachers in 2016 (and reasons to be cheerful!)

It hasn’t been easy, but Liam Collins is determined to keep “the positive energy up”. I wanted to be more positive this year. So I wrote a list, and one side was much longer than the other. Still, I’m going to try to keep the positive energy up. To help, let’s take the classic structure […]

Best books of 2016 for teachers and school leaders

The best books 2016 had to offer, chosen by Schools Week features editor, Cath Murray. 1. Don’t Send Him in Tomorrow by Jarlath O’Brien The beautifully written Don’t Send Him in Tomorrow rails against the “cloak of invisibility” over people with learning disabilities and suggests that every mainstream teacher should spend time in […]

School funding, grammars… 2016 has been ridiculous

If someone had said this time last year that by the end of 2016 I would be on the same side as Nicky Morgan and Lucy Powell and we’d all be trying to stop the first completely comprehensively-educated secretary of state from bringing back grammar schools I would have laughed in their face. 2016 has, […]

Two thirds of pupils from low-income backgrounds not ‘secondary ready’ by the end of primary

This morning, results from this spring’s key stage 2 assessments were published for over 16,000 primary and special schools. These are important as they are the first school level results to be published against the new ‘without levels’ assessments. They also use the Department for Education’s new value-added measures of progress. What leaps out immediately […]

Our school textbooks are all wrong

The content of our textbooks is fine – to a point. The books do what they are sold to do: teach children what they need to pass the exam for which they’ve been written. But these days a textbook is not, in a traditional sense, a textbook. It’s an exam primer. Current textbooks are crafted […]

Watch out government doesn’t try to remove BTECs from sixth forms

Bill Watkin makes a plea to leave applied general qualifications where they are: sitting alongside A-levels in an academic sixth-form curriculum. Sixth forms tend to offer a primarily academic curriculum to prepare students for higher education. Only a few engage in technical and professional education; most do either all A-levels or a blend of A-levels […]

To become education secretary, you should be privately educated, child-free and summer-born

If you want to be an education secretary you should be privately educated, have no children, and have a July or August birthday, writes Laura McInerney, whose presentation at SSAT gave an insight into what school leaders can learn from politicians. Politicians are forever visiting schools to “learn” from them, but how often do school […]

Here’s how to get monocultural schools mixing

As the Casey review warns of the risks of culturally isolated schools, Mashuda Shaikh shares her experience of helping to foster integration, tolerance and citizenship in her local community. My work involves engaging the community to become more cohesive and resilient in times of uncertainty and change by using heritage and history in fun ways. […]

Speed-read: The really quite important findings of the Post-16 Inequalities Report

Earlier this week a very clear, very useful report was released. And no, it wasn’t PISA. Published on Monday, the ‘social and ethnic inequalities in post-16 choices’ report sounds amazingly dull. But it isn’t. It’s rather great. The first clue it would include gems was that Education Datalab wrote it, on behalf of the Social […]

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