I recently watched the recent BBC series 'Are Our Kids Tough Enough: Chinese School' which followed the experiences of five maths teachers from China as they started teaching in a school in Southampton. I anticipated that I might learn something that might explain the very high levels of attainment of students from China in international [...]
How’s your driving? Below average, pretty normal, or better than most? Research suggests that the majority of our readers have just answered ‘better than most’. They are surely wrong. Only half of drivers can be better than the median. The other half are, by definition, below it. This is an example of what psychologists call [...]
Last week we published a report with data that suggests non-physics graduates can teach physics to GCSE standard just as well as physics graduates. Does mean that the Government’s battery of programmes to get physics and maths specialists into teaching is unnecessary? Probably not, for two reasons: 1. We appear to be hurtling into a [...]
It has been well reported that women fall behind men in their rates of promotion to school senior leadership positions. The well-versed reasons for this are similar to other professions, with women taking more time than men out of the labour market when they become parents, many deliberately choosing to take lower responsibility roles and [...]
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 [...]
This evening we launch Education Datalab with a report ‘Seven things you might not know about our schools'. Rich data on our schools has been available for over a decade now but, as we hope this report shows, there is still much we can learn. Every piece of analysis we show in this report is [...]
