This is part three in a series of blogposts exploring long-term disadvantage. Other posts in the series can be found here. Some of you might remember the 1996 TV series in which Christopher Ecclestone plays Nicky Hutchinson. As an impatient politician he argues that “Tomorrow is too late”. The Northern Powerhouse Partnership (NPP) has today issued [...]
A version of this blogpost also appears on the Centre for Education Economics website. The OECD's PISA study compares the science, reading and mathematics skills of 15-year-olds across countries, with the results closely watched by journalists, public policymakers and the general public from across the world. Conducted every three years, particular attention is now being [...]
Many of the blogposts and reports that we produce here at Datalab are based on analysis of the Department for Education’s National Pupil Database (NPD). But what is it? What is the NPD? The NPD is a collection of data relating to education in England compiled by the Department for Education. The NPD is made [...]
Most of the time our work involves using the National Pupil Database to examine particular aspects of the education system. However, it can also throw up interesting insights into the state of the nation more generally. Last year, we wrote about how the percentage of pupils eligible for and claiming free school meals (FSM) had [...]
Latest DfE statistics show that there were almost 16,000 pupils on-roll at pupil referral units, and another 22,000 in other local authority alternative provision in January 2017 [XLS, table 1b]. These are pupils whose education is paid for by the state but who do not have places at state-funded mainstream or special schools. The different [...]
Ofsted yesterday announced its response to the consultation it ran this summer on its short inspections policy. The inspectorate had proposed extending from 48 hours, to 15 days, the window in which a full inspection must take place after a short inspection converts. But it has now opened another consultation [PDF] that proposes that from [...]
A version of this post was first published in Research Intelligence, the British Educational Research Association’s termly magazine. When the PISA 2015 results were released in December last year, Vietnam was one of the countries that stood out as doing remarkably well. (PISA is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s triennial assessment of 15-year-olds [...]
Is it proportionate for schools with a good inspection rating to receive inspections the same in length and scope to those received by schools which had exhibited weaknesses in the recent past? That, in short, was the thinking when new, short inspections for schools with good ratings were introduced by Sir Michael Wilshaw in September [...]
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 [...]
