primary school | Schools Week

Gwyn ap Harri, chief design officer, XP School Trust

Gwyn ap Harri, chief design officer at XP School Trust, exploded onto the scene in 2014 with his tiny secondary school, where children don’t wear uniform and are in ‘crews’ rather than tutor groups. Now with eight schools up and running, Jess Staufenberg finds out how ap Harri is expanding his anti-orthodoxy model across the […]

Williamson’s ‘irrational’ refusal to revoke academy order quashed by High Court

The education secretary’s refusal to revoke an academy order for a primary school in the West Midlands has been ruled “irrational” and quashed by the High Court. Governors of Yew Tree Primary School in Sandwell brought a judicial review of a decision by education secretary Gavin Williamson to refuse to revoke the order imposed on […]

‘You grow with the grant, then shrink back at the end’: the primary scooping up DfE accolades

From the outside, Charles Dickens looks like any other inner-London primary school. But behind the walls of its building in Borough is a team that has worked on five different government school-to-school support initiatives in just four years. This year alone, Charles Dickens has become a behaviour hub, a teaching school hub and a flexible […]

Schools must be prepared for pupil-on-pupil sexual assault

It’s an uncomfortable subject for many, but a recent court case has highlighted the need for schools to have robust guidelines in place that address the problem of sexual abuse perpetrated by young children, says Emma Bannister Dean With Barnardo’s reporting to the House of Commons science and technology committee that children as young as […]

Primary schools relying on fundraising to deliver basic education

More than four in ten Kent primary schools are dependent on fundraising to deliver basic education for their pupils new research has found, and one charity believes the problem stretches nationwide. In 2018, 43 per cent of primary schools in Kent reported that they were reliant on fundraised income to deliver day-to-day, statutory teaching activities, […]

Government plans a review of children’s physical activity at school

Schools’ efforts to engage their least active pupils in physical activities will be reviewed by the government as it embarks on the second phase of its childhood obesity plan. The first phase, published in 2016, promised a ‘healthy schools’ rating scheme for primaries, and a new interactive online tool to help schools plan at least 30 minutes of […]