Inside Your Ed

This time last year, we did a podcast episode about the growing problem of pupil absences in the aftermath of the pandemic, with record numbers of children and young people failing to attend school on a regular basis.  Since then, finding ways to reduce absences has become a priority for both main political parties in England, and numerous initiatives have been put in place by the current governme...

“It’s not just a skill for learning, it’s also a skill for life. Not just for the workplace, also for working out who you are – for overcoming shyness or disaffection, anxiety or doubt – or even just for opening up more to our friends and family. We don’t do enough of that as a society, and I’m as guilty as anyone, but wouldn’t that be something precious for our children to aim for? I think so.” ...

In the current education policy landscape, the debate over adding VAT to independent school fees is by far the most high-profile dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives. That said, the question of what would actually happen in practice if Labour won the next election and tried to implement this policy has received remarkably little attention in political circles. That is why at the begi...

On the 15th of March in the year 2000, then Education Secretary David Blunkett invited businesses, churches and voluntary groups to build and manage a network of "city academies", a new type of urban secondary school outside the control of local authorities.  Little did David Blunkett, now Lord Blunkett, know that a quarter of a century later, there would be over 10,000 academy schools i...

Existential crisis - at risk of insolvency - looming financial crisis - ticking time bomb -  bankruptcy. Newspaper headline writers have certainly not been holding back in recent months as they try to describe the predicament that UK universities apparently find themselves in.  Then again, with a General Election on the way, universities and other higher education (or HE) providers are not going t...

With a General Election on the way, all eyes and ears are trained on what our politicians are saying about the future of education and skills.  However, there are plenty of other important individuals who you won’t see in the political spotlight but are nevertheless thinking hard about how to improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged children, young people and adults.  One such individual...

“The arrival of on-screen and online high stakes assessment has been predicted for many years.” Those are not my words, but the words of the exam regulator Ofqual back in 2020, in their report on the barriers to greater adoption of high stakes on-screen and online assessments, and how these barriers may be overcome.  Perhaps the wait for these digital assessments is finally over because in recent...

Almost exactly 12 months ago, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his plans for all students in England to study some form of maths to age 18. Ten months later, the Prime Minister went much further by announcing plans for a single qualification – called “the Advanced British Standard” – to bring together A-levels and T-levels as well as making both maths and English compulsory to 18.  Just before C...

Welcome back to Inside Your Ed in 2024 and happy New Year to all our listeners.  Speaking of things that are new, this episode is all about the new institutions - often called Challenger institutions – that have been appearing in England’s Higher Education (or HE) sector in recent years.  So what is a challenger institution? What obstacles have these new HE providers faced? Have the challenger ins...

It seems as though the government are intent on continuing their crusade against what they call ‘low value’ Higher Education, with the Prime Minister declaring at the Conservative Party conference in October that he would be “cracking down on rip-off degrees and boosting apprenticeships”.  Fast forward a few weeks to the Kings Speech in November, and again, the government iterated its goal to “red...

Ever since the Labour Party moved away from its plan to scrap university tuition fees, the debate over how to fund Higher Education, or HE, has gone rather quiet. Step forward Dr Mark Corver, the Managing Director and co-founder of dataHE, who wrote an article for the Higher Education Policy Institute at the start of November that set out an entirely new vision for how we could fund our HE system:...

Regular listeners will know that we recently dedicated a whole episode to the main education stories from this year’s Conservative and Labour Party conferences, but there was one story we didn’t get a chance to look at in that episode because it was announced on the last day of the last conference.  On the 11th of October, Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson outlined plans for a large-sc...

If you’ve been following the recent headlines on teacher recruitment and retention, you’ll know that the government’s statistics paint a grim picture of missed targets and schools finding it increasingly hard to find enough teachers.  In September, the Government decided to set up a new Workload Reduction Taskforce because ministers seem to believe that if they can reduce teachers’ workload then p...

 This year’s party conferences could be the last big gatherings before the next General Election, so it was the perfect opportunity for the Conservative Party and Labour Party to set out their respective plans.  That said, the challenges facing the two parties are very different. Can the Conservative Party convince voters that they are still the right people to oversee the education system after 1...

It has not been a great three and a half years to be a school pupil. The pandemic, repeated openings and closures of schools, illness and absences, exams disappearing then reappearing – it has clearly been a difficult time for many children and young people. In response, there have been numerous calls to prioritise pupil wellbeing as much as academic progress in the aftermath of the pandemic, give...

The annual cycle of school and college students applying to university, sitting their summer exams and being awarded their grades in August finally returned to normal this year after the severe disruption to delivering and grading exams caused by the pandemic.  But a recent news story shows that some things in our university application system have evidently not returned to business as usual.  Ear...

Welcome back to Inside Your Ed - I hope you all had a good summer. Just as the summer break was getting underway in late July, you may have missed a new report published by UNESCO , an agency of the United Nations, which investigated the use of education technology, or ed tech, around the world.  The report’s findings were quite startling, as they discovered that “there is little robust evidence o...

The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread predictions of a catastrophic situation for young people in terms of unemployment and lost earnings. However, although we did see a rise in youth unemployment by the middle of 2020, it never reached the scale of job losses that had been feared by many politicians and economists.  In the middle of 2023, it could hardly feel more different,...

It has often been said that school teachers should be called superheroes for heading into classrooms every day across the country to try to improve the lives and prospects of children and young people. But every superhero has a weakness, and a new book released at the start of June says that bad behaviour in the classroom can be like kryptonite to an unprepared teacher. By coincidence, the Departm...

With widespread strike action already underway across the education system and with so many institutions in need of more staff and more money, things can understandably feel a little gloomy. Even so, a story that hit the headlines last month provided a welcome bit of good news.  May 16th saw the release of the latest results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study – known as PIRL...

In the world of education and politics more broadly, we are all used to seeing politicians making major announcements and getting plenty of media coverage as a result. That makes it even more noteworthy when a politician gets plenty of media coverage for announcing that they don’t actually have a policy at all.  And so it was that Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, found himself hitting the...

Covid may no longer be forcing schools to close or requiring pupils to self-isolate at home but there are still a worrying number of empty desks in schools. Both government datasets and independent sources have confirmed that there has been a dramatic increase in pupil absences over the past year. In fact, the situation has got so bad that it is being described as the ‘new epidemic for schools’. S...

As always, the month of May signals the beginning of exam season, with students around the country facing various challenges such as GCSEs and A-levels.  Given the high-profile nature of these tests, EDSK has just published a brand new report called ‘Examining exams’, in which we looked in detail at why written exams have come to dominate the assessment landscape and also, perhaps more importantly...

In March this year, the news that headteacher Ruth Perry had taken her own life caused a huge storm both within and outside the teaching profession after Ruth’s family claimed that a recent Ofsted inspection had contributed to her death. In the weeks since this news emerged, a row has erupted between government and unions about whether Ofsted inspections should be paused, or possibly scrapped alto...

On April 6th 2023, the apprenticeship levy celebrates its sixth birthday. The question now is whether the levy will get the chance to celebrate many more birthdays in future.  The levy is essentially a payroll tax of 0.5 per cent for any UK employer with an annual wage bill of over £3 million, with the total pot of levy contributions funding the entire apprenticeship system for both large and smal...