Home » Opinion » How to write for Schools Week

How to write for Schools Week

On this page:

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or feel the need to express your view for the first time, there’s a place for you in Schools Week.

There’s a lot of advice here, but don’t be daunted. Our commissioning editor will support you every step of the way to give you a bespoke experience and get the best out of your article.

This matters, because whether it’s a strong opinion, a fresh perspective, a new idea or some best practice, we want everyone to hear what you have to say, so we will use all of our expertise to help ensure they do.

The advice below is designed to help you with that, though the best starting point is to read lots of Schools Week opeds. (Subscribe here and you’ll have the editor’s picks delivered to your inbox every term-time Friday.)

Editorial vs advertorial

First things first: Opinion is free but overt product sales pitches are not. (Click here for our competitive advertising packages. Our sponsored articles have excellent sector reach, in part because they are honest about their true aim.)

We will seldom allow even a mention of a specific product or service in an article (even free ones), as this would constitute interference in a market. Our readers will come to you if they find your article insightful and useful, so let your Schools Week byline do the heavy lifting on this front. 

Finally, we won’t accept a piece that has been published elsewhere first. If you or your organisation wish to re-publish your Schools Week article elsewhere after it’s been published with us, we will typically agree to that provided there is a link back to the original on our website. Please check with us first.

Making the cut

We typically publish a maximum of ten opeds each week. No more than five of these make the weekly subscriber edition. All will be published online, and none is paywalled.

Which of these ten go into the digital edition is a complex editorial decision taking many factors into consideration. We can never guarantee this will be the case for your article. This is the nature of news. Either way, however, every Schools Week article is ensured a wide readership.

We commission many of our opeds ourselves, but we love to be surprised by an original and/or unexpected take. Having said that, we receive a great many pitches so yours needs to stand out to make the cut.

Here’s how.

Finding your crowd

When you write for us, you’re writing for a core readership of school and school system leaders. They read Schools Week to find a challenge to their thinking and practice, or support in its implementation – ideally both.

They span every type of provision and every leadership position within them, so no article is too niche. The key is to keep your audience in mind, acknowledge the specific challenges they face, and also consider how you can make your key message relevant to our wider readership.

We welcome pitches on (almost) everything from accountability to zero tolerance, and we never turn down an article because of the position it adopts, provided it’s well-founded and presented with professional courtesy.

We will usually decline articles that are direct responses to other articles. If you disagree with an opinion we’ve published, we urge you to use the ‘comment’ facility on our website to pursue the conversation there. If you wish to build on someone’s article in a constructive way, that’s another matter, and worth presenting to us.

The only subject we don’t publish articles about is mainstream pedagogy. We trust our readers to be informed enough to make their own choices on that front. However, we will consider articles that can assist with inclusive classroom practice. These will typically appear in our Solutions column.

If you’re sharing new research or a new report, then we have a column for you too: The Knowledge. To qualify for publication in this column, we typically expect the guest post to coincide closely with the publication of the research or report, and to give our readers exclusive insight into its findings.  

Making your pitch

Your pitch can be a brief outline or a first draft. 

When you pitch your idea, search our website to see what’s already been written about its theme to ensure your angle brings something new to the table.

Our most popular themes can be found on the drop-down menu under the Opinion tab on the main menu of the Schools Week website. We refresh this regularly to reflect the sector’s changing priorities.

We love reaction pieces, so approach us with your insight and expertise as soon as you can following significant news affecting the sector – especially news we may not have covered (which does happen). 

Promoting diverse voices

Schools Week is committed to being a platform for everyone in the sector. Staff and pupils come from all backgrounds and we want to showcase that diversity on our pages.

If you’re a group or organisation, when deciding who should write a piece, please consider authors from under-represented groups. Shockingly given the make-up of the sector, this includes women in leadership.

This also includes specific positions. We love to hear from a headteacher or a CEO, but they may not always be the best person to address an issue. Why not offer a platform to your SENCo, your safeguarding lead, or your assistant headteacher for curriculum? This can be a brilliant professional development opportunity for your talented and ambitious staff.

Writing essentials

We’re not an academic journal. Your article should read as though you’re having a lively and insightful discussion with friends over dinner. This makes for a good read and ensures your points are accessible.  

Unless offered a (very) rare ‘long read’, our word count is 650 to 680. If you go over, we will edit it down and run the new version by you before publishing.

To make our Friday edition, your deadline is typically Monday. That gives us the time to work together on edits.

Don’t be alarmed or offended if we send you a list of these to consider. We do this for every article, whether it comes from the school secretary or the education secretary.

Start your article with a line or two that grab the reader’s attention and set the scene for the rest of the piece. Good ways to do this are to make the stakes clear or to ask a challenging question.

If you’re writing about a topic we’ve covered, please include a link to a news story or another opinion piece.

If you reference some research, please do that by adding hyperlinks, not a list of references or bibliographies. (Remember, not a journal.)

By all means, use AI to help you structure your thoughts or rephrase a sentence or two. However, the essence of a good oped lies in its authenticity, which even the best AI tools can only mimic. We will send it back if it lacks that.

And lastly, our sector is littered with jargon. Please do your best to avoid it.

Style guide

Don’t worry too much about this side of things. Our sub-editors can put this right as they set your article for publication. However, here are some of the bigger points to note.

As well as jargon, our sector is uniquely prone to adopting acronyms. Spell these out when you use them for the first time. (Yes, even DfE. And no, not SATs or GCSEs.)

For consistency, we format most things in lower case. Use this for curriculum subjects other than individual languages (eg, maths, biology and French), policies (eg. the schools bill and behaviour hubs) and job titles. 

Organisations, acronyms and certain qualifications (eg Ofsted, GCSE, A-level) can be upper case.

Let’s get started

Ready? Our commissioning editor loves to make copy sing. Send JL your pitch on jl@schoolsweek.co.uk, and let’s get you published.