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24 July 2026

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Opinion

How to make EAL pupils feel safer post-EU referendum

“Bye bye, you’re going home”: playground ‘banter’. “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin”: anonymous leaflets left outside a primary school. “Why are there only 10 white faces in this class? Why are you not educating the English?”: street harassment  reported by a KS1 teacher. On Friday June 24 at 5 am I tweeted what turned out […]

Exams may have got easier, but pupils have an appetite for hard questions

Exam question changes in the past two decades have often been made for clarity and “accessibility”, says Tim Oates. But A-level questions from decades ago now available on the web, are proving that there is still a huge appetite for demanding physics Social media allows global circulation of all sorts of conversations that previously would […]

Could multi-academy trusts be a potential model for the good local authorities?

We’ve heard some local authorities are looking at setting up a multi-academy trust – could this be a potential model for the good local authorities? Antony says: The government has made its policy position on the role of local authorities in education very clear in the white paper. It sees local authorities taking on a “more […]

Rewards, rather than punishments, help teenagers learn

What have you been working on? We used a combination of lab-based computer tasks and computational learning models to compare how adolescents and adults learn to make choices, based on different types of feedback. Adolescent and adult volunteers played a computer task, in which they saw different pairs of abstract symbols on a computer screen, […]

Access arrangements — are they a right or a privilege?

Recent changes to the official guidelines on access arrangements and assistive technology have wide-reaching implications for all pupils if implemented equitably, argues Andrew Harland Access arrangements (AA) help pupils with special educational needs, learning difficulties, disabilities or temporary injuries, to access the exam system. They are often seen as the preserve of pupils with special […]

Multiple-choice exams plus portfolios – proposal for a new assessment system

Marking can never be 100 per cent reliable. So perhaps it is time, says one-time examiner Debra Kidd, to remove open-ended tasks from the exam system altogether I was once an examiner. It was a mind numbing, cheerless experience that was paid at a pittance, but I did it, year on year, because it gave me […]

We can’t ignore the high-fliers who are not being pushed

The last few weeks of EU referendum debate have shown how badly we do latent anger as a country. Whatever ideals one may hold, whatever the reality may be, swathes of the population nevertheless feel as if politicians have long ignored them and want to exert more power over their lives. By the time you […]