Inside Your Ed

Since T-levels were introduced in 2020 as new technical qualifications for 16 to 19-year-olds, they have rarely been out of the spotlight. In the last two years alone we have had major reports on T-levels from the Education Select Committee in Parliament, Ofsted and the National Audit Office – none of which painted a particularly rosy picture of how these qualifications have fared so far.  The lat...

On Thursday 4th July 2024, the Labour Party won a resounding victory in the UK General Election. In their election-winning manifesto, Labour’s number one pledge within their mission to ‘break down barriers to opportunity’ was to recruit 6,500 new teachers. This pledge for 6,500 teachers has been repeated many times by government ministers in the 12 months since the election, but we’ve hardly heard...

On June 11th, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the result of the Government’s Spending Review, which confirmed the budgets that each government department will have until 2028. The Department for Education, or DfE’s budget will rise from £101 billion to £109 billion over this period – an increase of 0.8% after adjusting for inflation. So, is the Spending Review outcome a good or bad result f...

I think most people would agree that England’s rise up the international education league tables over the past decade or so has been a welcome sign of progress. But when government funding is now in such short supply and is likely to remain so for some time yet, sustaining this recent progress may become increasingly challenging. A new report from IPPR and Ambition Institute, written by Loic Menzi...

Since the COVID pandemic, many jobs have been transformed by the dramatic expansion of hybrid and remote working. A recent survey by the education charity Teach First found that 80% of young people now want some element of hybrid work in their jobs – which sounds like bad news for frontline professions such as teaching. However, far from giving up the fight, some schools and trusts have decided to...

Shortly before £1,000 tuition fees were first introduced in 1998, a landmark report by Sir Ron Dearing had pointed out that employers were also “major beneficiaries of higher education through the skills which those with higher education qualifications bring to the organisations which employ them.” This led Dearing to recommend that government should “seek an enhanced contribution” from employers...

No-one is surprised when a newly elected government decides to create new initiatives and new organisations to signify a change in direction and a break from the past. Skills England, a new agency within the Department for Education, was announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer just after last year’s General Election, along with his observation that “our skills system is in a mess”. But since that...

The Curriculum and Assessment Review, which is being chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was commissioned by the Department for Education last summer and will not conclude its work until this autumn. Even so, the Review has attracted so much interest from schools, colleges, teachers, leaders and parents that the interim report from the Review, published at the end of March, was an important and hi...

Those who work in and around the Higher Education, or HE sector, have been having a rough time if recent media headlines are anything to go by. Since the turn of the year, there has been what’s felt like a constant stream of stories about universities making redundancies, cutting costs and scaling back their operations in an attempt to make themselves more financially sustainable. But despite all...

Seeing as the government is clearly short of spare cash, you would have thought the Department for Education investing in a new national programme to improve pupils’ outcomes would be well received. The Government recently announced over £30 million for a pilot of free breakfast clubs in 750 primary schools starting in April 2025 in advance of an expected national rollout of breakfast clubs in all...

Given the endless debates and disagreements about Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, Ofsted’s proposed new framework for conducting inspections was never going to go unnoticed when it launched in early February to kick off a 12-week consultation. But far from splitting opinion, a poll by Teacher Tapp of more than 11,000 teachers found that 0% of respondents were ‘very positive...

Shortly after the General Election in 2024, the newly elected Labour government announced a Children’s Wellbeing Bill – a new piece of legislation that set out a range of policies such as a register of children not in schools, restrictions on branded items in school uniforms and greater powers for Ofsted to tackle illegal schools. However, just before Christmas, the Children’s Wellbeing Bill sudde...

Just before the end of 2024, the Government announced the outcome of their review of Level 3 vocational and technical qualifications, which are offered to 16 to 19-year-olds along with A-levels, apprenticeships and the new T-levels. The review confirmed that many vocational and technical qualifications that were going to have their funding removed will in fact continue to be funded. Well, at least...

Happy New Year and welcome back to Inside Your Ed. Regular listeners will know that this podcast usually focuses on the latest education news in England, but for my first episode of 2025 we are taking a quick trip over the Atlantic because, as you may have noticed, Donald Trump will start his second term as President of the United States on January 20th. So what plans does President-elect Trump ha...

“Labour will establish a youth guarantee of access to training, an apprenticeship, or support to find work for all 18- to 21-year-olds, to bring down the number of young people who are not learning or earning.” So said the Labour Party election manifesto in June 2024. Fast forward to the end of 2024, and the Labour Government confirmed in its Get Britain Working report that a Youth Guarantee is no...

When it feels like every voter and politician has their own opinion on how to run the education system in England, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a credible, independent, evidence-led organisation that provided balanced information to politicians, government officials and the public on how to solve some of the biggest policy challenges. Well, as luck would have it, a new institute called the Cen...

Nuclear fusion offers the tantalising prospect of being a potentially limitless source of clean and self-sustaining energy, but, as the old joke goes, nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, and has been for decades. I’m starting to get the same feeling about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, or LLE, which was first floated back in 2019 as a new way of funding Further and Higher Education courses...

On November 4th, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed that, for the first time since 2017, university tuition fees in England will rise from £9,250 to £9,535 for full-time undergraduates. The maximum maintenance loan available to students to cover their living costs will also increase by around 3%. Although these changes will do little to allay concerns about the long-term financial he...

If you were asked to pick out a success story from the last 14 years of education policy, I’m sure some people would point to England’s rise in the international rankings for global tests such as PISA. In 2022, England came 11th for maths, up from 27th in 2009. That’s why I was intrigued to see recent reports claim that the way we teach and assess maths needs to be overhauled to make up for severa...

The most significant education policy launched at last month’s Labour Party conference was the release of new details about the Growth and Skills Levy, which is set to replace the existing apprenticeship levy as a way of funding apprenticeships and other forms of training. The government claims they will boost opportunities for young people through what they describe as an “ambitious” set of refor...

It is hard not to raise an eyebrow when a government policy is described by some as a ‘vital lifeline’ for students, while others describe the same policy as ‘demoralising’ and ‘soul destroying’. The GCSE resits policy, which has been in place since 2014, continues to divide opinion among academics, researchers, school and college leaders and the frontline staff who support those students who must...

Although complaints from universities about a perceived lack of funding continue to attract plenty of media attention, some very interesting shifts in policy thinking that are potentially more significant than simple questions about money are already underway. Several countries such as Australia, Wales, Scotland and Ireland have begun to talk less about universities and colleges in isolation and i...

Although this year’s exam season has largely passed without incident or drama, many exams and assessments throughout our education system are potentially facing their greatest ever threat in the form of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence, or AI tools. When freely available websites and apps can write entire essays, projects, articles, poems and stories as well as produce art and music among...

“Read my lips — I will bring immigration numbers down” said Keir Starmer during the recent General Election campaign. The Labour Party election manifesto also said that “Labour will act to create a secure future for higher education”.  In isolation, both these goals are legitimate aspirations, but when you put them together it raises an interesting policy question: how will the new government appr...

Sometimes a UK General Election can be a tense and nervy affair with little indication of which party will prevail. The upcoming election on July 4th is not one of those situations, with the Labour Party miles ahead in the polls and set to form the next government. However, for today we are put the polls to one side and dive into what we’ve seen and heard over the past couple of weeks from the cur...