Dodd Partners
‘LAURA MCINERNEY’
In 2012, the scientist Frans de Waal revealed how monkeys go berserk if paid unequally for a task. A YouTube video, watched 13 million times, shows a researcher giving two Capuchin monkeys a food treat in return for handing her a pebble. When the first monkey is given a cucumber, he happily eats it. But […]
Opinion
Are schools going to get more money? That’s the question headteachers keep asking – not least at the ASCL conference last week – and it’s the one that’s guaranteed to cause everyone grief. And quite honestly, the answer appears to be no. Damian Hinds is a classic low-tax Conservative. In his time as a member […]
Five years ago Laura McInerney and Matt Hood developed a model for how the schools system might work more coherently. Few people listened. Some parts were echoed in David Blunkett’s review of school management, but, otherwise, it failed. ‘Never mind, the system will work out,’ they thought. Five years on, and it’s still not okay. […]
Insufficient funding, excessive accountability, poor teacher retention and limited school autonomy were the core issues which 200 heads tackled last Friday at the second Headteachers Roundtable. The 2018 summit kicked off with opening remarks by the chair, Stephen Tierney, followed by Schools Week’s very own Laura McInerney, who grilled Robert Halfon on his recent work […]
News
Two conferences this week and I got the now obligatory conference-chat about robots at both. Andreas Schleicer, the head of the PISA tests and a perma-attendee at conferences, showed a slide at the Whole Education Conference stating that “the kind of things that are easy to teach are now easy to automate, digitise or outsource”. […]
Schools are letting teachers take their planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time at home, banning work in the staff room and cutting the hours of senior leaders, all in the name of staff wellbeing and flexible working. But researchers believe more still should be done to “normalise flexible working in schools”, and have launched a […]
Back in the 2000s, “thinking hats” were a mega-cool concept in schools. Available in six different colours, each one signified a way of thinking about a problem. For example, yellow-hat thinking involved looking positively at a problem, while people wearing white hats were told to look purely at facts. The concept is less cool these […]
In the summer of 2013, the health secretary was stopped in his tracks. Jeremy Hunt’s decision to close the emergency department at Lewisham Hospital was ruled unlawful. It was a victory for local campaigners but it would also become a parable for the situation in which academies would one day find themselves. I fear that […]
Before I became a teacher I briefly worked for KPMG, one of the world’s largest auditors. It was shortly after the fall of Enron, itself one of the world’s largest accountancy firms, after its senior leaders were discovered up to their necks in fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy, among other things. The fall of Enron […]
