Figures came out recently that showed that the proportion of children eligible for free school meals (FSM) was at its lowest level since 2001 [PDF], when pupil-level information on this was first collected nationally. This is likely to be for a combination of reasons: an economy that has improved since the early 2010s, meaning fewer parents [...]
Last Thursday at the Festival of Education, Sam Sims and I presented new research from our forthcoming book, The Teacher Gap, on the small number of schools that appear to be knowingly running a recruit-burnout-replace staffing model. The talk was written up by Schools Week and you can read the whole story of these teachers [...]
Schools Week last week published a handy summary of Ofqual’s release of summer 2017 examination entry statistics. It notes that entries in EBacc subjects have risen whilst entries in other subjects have fallen. This raises the question of whether the EBacc is crowding other subjects out of the curriculum. In defence of the EBacc, Schools [...]
Congratulations! You’ve passed your 11-plus. How confident do you feel that you would have passed if you had sat a slightly different test on a different day of the week? In our recent analysis of the Kent 11-plus we expressed concern that the issue of who passes is incredibly sensitive to slight variation in candidate [...]
Update, 24 May 2017, 13:14: Schools Week have reported that the Conservatives are distancing themselves from the £60m figure. One of the more eye-catching proposals in the Conservatives’ manifesto was the plan to drop universal infant free schools meals (UIFSMs) and bring in free breakfasts for all primary pupils [PDF]. While no further details were [...]
The Conservatives’ manifesto has revised the party’s commitment to require all students to study the English Baccalaureate subjects at Key Stage 4. It now has a more modest proposal that 75% of students should study the EBacc by the end of the next parliament [PDF]. To be considered to have entered the EBacc a child [...]
Post-16 education is in a period of flux, with major qualification reforms and a drop in per-student spending. Reformed A-Levels began to be introduced from September 2015, with a concurrent decoupling of AS-Levels. And, as the IFS have reported [PDF], spending per student in school sixth forms and further education has been falling since 2010/11. [...]
This is part three in a series of posts exploring trends in attainment over time by month of birth. Other posts in the series can be found here. The first two blogposts in this series showed that pupils’ attainment varies with their month of birth, with September-born pupils on average having higher attainment than those born [...]
This is part of a series of posts from Datalab on how the 11-plus works in practice in Kent. Find the other posts in the series here. It is worth summarising some of the things that we have observed in the course of this analysis. Relatively small changes to the rules that determine whether a [...]
