Inside Your Ed

In his foreword to the Government’s new ‘levelling up’ plans, the Prime Minister declared that “From day one, the defining mission of this government has been to level up this country”  - which raises the question of why it has taken over two years to find out what ‘levelling up’ actually means. But at long last, the government has revealed all – or so they claimed.  The Prime Minister accepted th...

It is not just Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has been imploring us to BUILD BACK BETTER. Even US President Joe Biden has used this same phrase to describe his own plans to reshape America in response to the pandemic.  So what would BUILDING BACK BETTER look like in the context of our education system? Plenty of attention and debate has focused on the question of what exams in England should loo...

A new Education Secretary was appointed a few months ago, and the government feels that now is the time to reshape the schools system by publishing a White Paper, which describes their proposals for future policies and the legal changes needed to deliver them.  The year, of course, is 2010 and recently appointed Education Secretary Michael Gove is about to launch his ambitious plans that would res...

Special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short, covers a wide range of difficulties that can affect a child or young person’s ability to learn. This could relate to their behaviour, reading and writing skills, physical abilities, social skills and much more besides.  Well before COVID-19 emerged, and perhaps even more so since the pandemic began, almost every major news story about...

Looking for your first ever job can be a daunting experience at the best of times. Looking for your first ever job in the middle of a global pandemic will only make things harder.  In recessions, unemployment among young people is normally one of the most visible casualties. In the economic downturn that followed the financial crisis in 2008, the proportion of 16 to 24 year olds who were out of wo...

In terms of name recognition in our education system, two brands are hard to beat: A-levels, which were created back in 1951, and apprenticeships, which have been around for quite literally hundreds of years.  However, the question of what should sit between A-levels and apprenticeships has been debated and contested for a long time, and not in a good way. The two most recent attempts to fill the...

The government does not often find itself in a war of words with the likes of Oxford University and Cambridge University, yet that is precisely what has transpired over the past few months.   But their public disagreements have nothing to do with tuition fees, student loans or university funding. Instead, it is the government’s proposed reforms to the way teachers are trained that has generated a...

It is often said that a week is a long time in politics, and yet it is now almost four years since the former Prime Minister Theresa May announced a review of Post-18 Education and Funding to be led by Philip Augar.  The Review, which was completed in May 2019, provided a detailed analysis of the whole post-18 education sector in England including universities, colleges and apprenticeships. In fac...

On Wednesday this week, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled the government’s Autumn Budget and the outcome of their 2021 Spending Review. The Budget described the upcoming changes to taxation while the Spending Review set out how much money each government department will get over the next three years. There were certainly some eye-catching announcements including big increases in government spend...