secondary school | Schools Week

How useful are the KS2 maths SATs test results?

The key stage 2 SATs results are out, but how useful are the results? asks Anne Watson, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Oxford The aim of the new key stage 2 curriculum was to raise the standard of mathematics and make sure pupils were ready for secondary mathematics, and the test had to adhere to […]

The battle for informal learning

What have you been working on? I’ve been talking to teachers who are working to provide informal science teaching for students in extra-curricular clubs. I wanted to understand their motivation and their struggle. From a broader perspective, my aim is to look at education policy and try to find how it plays out in teachers’ […]

Do careers talks in schools improve pupils’ life chances?

What have you been working on? The impact of school-based careers talks, with people from outside school, on earnings at age 26. We analysed data from the British cohort study of 1970 – which covers 17,000 people – to work out whether they had an impact, and, if so, what type of interventions and at […]

How can we get young people eating healthy food at lunchtime?

What’s your research about? The factors that underpin young people’s food and drink purchases in and around schools. The study, which was funded by Food Standards Scotland, looked at seven state secondary schools in Scotland, where pupils were allowed to leave the grounds at lunchtime. The schools were in five local education authority areas with […]

Be functional, not faddish, and keep it simple

New school buildings are a difficult brief: they must be flexible, functional, welcoming and poised for change. Educators can meet that challenge if they start with a checklist of do’s and don’ts, says Craig Smailes Schools are, by their nature, subject to changing needs. Populations change, educational methods evolve and technology continues to alter the […]

Break a habit and tap the potential of key stage 3

In a week when primary tests are dominating the headlines, Ed Cadwallader asks what happens to the “wasted years” of key stage 3 National curriculum levels have been scrapped following the recognition that the thinking behind them was flawed. The argument is that we should not consider progress to be a series of ordered steps […]

Randomly allocating places in over-subscribed schools is the fairest option

As parents find out if their child will go to their preferred secondary school, Alastair Thomson considers what governors can do to stop lengthy appeals. Each year schools get a hard lesson about how they are perceived when parents express preferences for where their daughter or son should be educated. Eight years ago I was […]

‘My child was supposed to go to grammar school – we shop at Waitrose!’

When Joanne Bartley’s daughter failed her 11-plus, her opportunities contracted drastically. She has done well, but now faces a move to a third Kent secondary before she goes on to university. Selection, says her mother, is a self-perpetuating system that has little to do with social mobility When my daughter failed her 11-plus I was […]

Our longer school day engages our students

Setting up a new school is, in equal measure, the hardest, most frustrating, most time consuming and most enjoyable thing I have ever done in my 17 years in education. In 2013, our new secondary school emerged into an education system with growing challenges, not least squeezing a stimulating and varied programme of study and […]