Inside Your Ed

Just one week after becoming Prime Minister in July, Andy Burnham declared that “For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected. The whole school system has been built around it and that has let down young people seeking technical qualifications.” And what was his solution? “I want an education system based on parity betwee...

September saw the launch of the results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA for short. Run by the OECD, PISA includes maths, reading and science tests for 15-year-olds across 90 countries as well as a survey about pupils’ education. At first glance, England appears to have done very well in the latest PISA tests, rising to 10th place in maths, 9th place in reading...

As the new academic year kicks off across the country, there will inevitably be a lot of attention on whether enough people have chosen to embark on a new career in teaching to hit the Government’s teacher recruitment targets. However, a new book called ' Love the One You’re With: Why teachers stay and what we can learn from them ' argues that teacher retention matters just as much as te...

So here we are, with a new Prime Minister in place two years on from the General Election. In my last podcast, we had two expert guests join us to explore what an Andy Burnham premiership might mean for schools in England. In this episode, I have brought together two policy experts to help us take a look at what could happen in post-16 education, consisting of universities, colleges, apprenticeshi...

“The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end.” Our likely next Prime Minister Andy Burnham did not hold back in his speech at the end of June, adding that “we need a complete rethink of how we support the next generation to succeed”. The question now is what do these sorts of comments mean for pupils, teachers, school leaders and those work...

“Labour will end the VAT exemption for private schools to invest in our state schools.” So said the Labour Party election manifesto in 2024, and in the Budget later that year the addition of VAT to school fees was enacted. This was soon followed by predictions of a dramatic fall in the number of pupils attending independent schools, with some claiming that we would see a 25% drop as a result of th...

The Government’s consultation on their proposed reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, or SEND, system closed on May 18th. Yet among the 39 consultation questions spread over 136 pages, one issue was notable by its absence: school admissions. Judging by the analysis in a new report by the Sutton Trust called ‘Selective Inclusion’ , ignoring state school admission policies withi...

It has been over 3.5 years since then opposition leader Keir Starmer announced that a Labour government would give businesses the flexibility they need to train their workforce by turning the Conservative Party’s apprenticeships levy into a ‘Growth and Skills Levy’. After waiting a very long time to hear anything meaningful about the Growth and Skills Levy, we have suddenly been inundated in the o...

With exam season just around the corner, hundreds of thousands of students in schools, colleges and universities are making their final preparations as they aim for a successful outcome and possibly the very top grades. But, as we know, for many children, young people and adults, rather than experiencing success in the coming weeks and months, they will instead find themselves encountering failure...

“We have concluded the disadvantages are such that we do not support a graduate tax” So said Lord Dearing in his landmark review of Higher Education, or HE funding in 1997, shortly before tuition fees were first introduced. Over a decade later, Lord Browne’s review of HE funding in 2010 also rejected calls for a graduate tax before going on to propose a significant uplift in tuition fees. Here we...

SEND reforms to 'strip away' children's legal protections, charity says. That was according to a recent headline on the BBC website. Needless to say, the Department for Education, or DfE, disagrees, claiming that their planned reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities system in England represent “a clear expansion of children’s rights”. When so much money, time, effo...

Normally a Schools White Paper from the Department for Education, or DfE, would attract plenty of attention on its release as it sets out the direction of travel on schools policy for the foreseeable future. But when the new Schools White Paper was launched on February 23rd, the media focus was instead on the DfE’s plans to reform the special educational needs system in England. Those special need...

VAT on school fees, the end of their business rates relief, a big hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions, falling pupil rolls. It is no exaggeration to say that independent schools in England have had a very tough couple of years financially. These pressures have already forced some independent schools to close, but what if, rather than closing, these struggling schools became state s...

On the 28th of October 2021, the first ever episode of Inside Your Ed was released. Almost four and a half years later, I’m delighted to say that this is episode number 100 of Inside Your Ed – quite a milestone for a podcast with a tiny budget but a big interest in education policy. Of course, little did we know in October 2021 that just a year later, the launch of ChatGPT would herald the emergen...

“It’s been a terrible year to graduate and find a job” said a recent headline in the Financial Times. Other newspapers have also chipped in with equally gloomy headlines such as “Where have all the graduate jobs gone”, “It’s a jobs desert” and ‘It’s so demoralising’: UK graduates exasperated by high unemployment”. So why are so many seemingly well qualified young people finding it hard to get a jo...

Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you’ve all had a great start to 2026. Last year concluded with an action-packed autumn term of education policies, including the Curriculum and Assessment Review, a Post 16 White Paper and a new levy on international students along with several announcements on extra funding for schools and families. But fear not, because this year is already poised to offer...

In January 2025, I recorded an episode of Inside Your Ed titled ‘Will the debate over vocational and technical qualifications ever end?’. It is therefore rather fitting that my final podcast of 2025 will prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this debate shows no sign of ending anytime soon. In November this year, the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review proposed the creation of V levels -...

For the Higher Education, or HE sector, it may be starting to feel like one step forward is almost immediately followed by one step backward. Last year, the announcement of a rise in tuition fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a large increase in taxes on employers, including HE providers, which probably wiped out some, if not all the extra fee income. This year, the decision to again r...

“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.” Those words from then Children and Families Minister Edward Timpson back in 2014 accompanied the launch of a new system for supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, o...

The goal was evolution, not revolution, and when the final report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was published on November 5th, that is precisely what was delivered. Across primary and secondary education in England, the Review proposed changes to the system as a whole as well as individual subjects, with all the changes firmly rooted in the evidence...

It is entirely normal for a Government to announce plans to reform either Higher Education (HE) or Further Education (FE). What is much less normal is a Government announcing a plan to reform HE and FE at the same time. The Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper, published on the 20th of October, sought to do precisely that, as it set out the Government’s plan “to educate and train the workforce...

Prime Minister Keir Starmer generated plenty of headlines at the Labour Party conference in late September when he set a new target of two-thirds of young people completing some form of higher level learning beyond school or college. Rather than hitting this target purely by expanding university degrees, the government has set an extra sub-target of ensuring that by 2040 at least 10% of young peop...

If you were looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future of Higher Education, or HE, in England, the last academic year was a rather disappointing spectacle. The inflation-linked rise in tuition fees towards the end of 2024 was swallowed up by the simultaneous increase in National Insurance costs for employers, including HE providers, while this summer’s Spending Review across all governm...

When Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, launched a consultation earlier this year on their new framework for conducting inspections, the response from teachers and leaders was pretty damning. That’s not to say that an inspection system is ever likely to be universally loved, but Ofsted’s original plans – which we discussed on this podcast back in February – created a huge back...

Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you all had a great summer. For many people working in politics, the summer break offers a gentler pace of life while most MPs and government ministers are away from Westminster. However, one former MP and minister decided that instead of putting his feet up, he should publish a new book that was almost destined to attract plenty of attention. At the start o...