Over the weekend the Daily Mail reported on plans to open the first new Grammar School in 50 years. The arguments for and against Grammar Schools as agents of educational improvement and social mobility will doubtless be rehearsed with even greater vigour in the coming months. In this blog we look at whether private tuition [...]
The Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, will likely talk this week about the new requirement for schools to teach all Key Stage 4 pupils the English Baccalaureate subjects of English, maths, science, history or geography and a language. This follows a speech last week by Nick Gibb and is arguably the most significant part [...]
Today the Sutton Trust has published Missing Talent, a research brief we wrote on the 7,000 pupils who score in the top 10% nationally in their KS2 tests, yet who five years later receive a set of GCSE results that places them outside the top 25%. The findings show that boys, particularly those from disadvantaged [...]
The changes made by the coalition government to secondary school accountability, such as the EBACC, the Wolf Review and Progress 8, have tended to be met by concern that 'creative' subjects will become marginalised as a result of schools placing greater emphasis on 'academic' subjects. In recent weeks, for example, the TES questioned whether creative [...]
The Wolf Review of 2011 heralded major changes to the Key Stage 4 Performance Tables this year. Much of the media coverage in the wake of their publication tended to focus on a fall in the headline percentage of pupils achieving 5 or more A*-C grades (or equivalents) including English and mathematics and a rise [...]
When national results at Key Stage 4 were published last November phrases like "the gap between rich and poor widens" typified headlines in the national press. This was because the gap between the attainment of disadvantaged (often called Pupil Premium) pupils and others in the headline measure of 5A*-C including English and maths had increased [...]
In recent days there has been some discussion about the way grades in current GCSEs will be scored alongside reformed GCSEs when calculating Progress 8 in 2017 and 2018. In 2016, when Progress 8 will be fully introduced into Performance Tables, GCSE grades A*-G will be converted into points on the 1-8 scale. By 2019, [...]
A couple of weekends ago I attended the London Festival of Education. The “London Effect” in secondary schools, a topic on which I have blogged previously, was much discussed. One of the important contributions to the debate, cited by a number of presenters at the festival, was made last year by Simon Burgess from Bristol [...]
We want the nation’s children to be taught by teachers who are passionate experts in the subject they teach. There is widespread concern that many children are taught science and maths by teachers without an academic degree in the subject. This shortage is most acutely felt in physics, with large numbers of unfilled teacher training [...]
