Category Archives: blog

Fixing Progress

Is cheating endemic in our schools? This anonymous teacher offers a view: In February this year, a survey of Teach First graduates found that respondents had experienced the pressure, or indeed the command, to cheat during GCSE assessments. In January, more »

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Making cooperative schools a reality

This article was originally published by Progress The Department for Education’s vision is for a highly educated society in which opportunity is more equal for children and young people no matter what their background or family circumstances. I recently presented more »

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Seven Things All Politicians Should Know About Education

This is a cross-post from Scenes From The Battleground I find much of the contribution from politicians to the education debate in this country utterly pointless. So many political types simply do not realise how the system works or what more »

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A Further Word on Educational Inequality

This article was originally posted on Laura McInerney’s blog Yesterday I explained why inaccurate use of the term “educational inequality” makes me uneasy. But then I started thinking about a gross educational inequality that is hardly ever mentioned, and it made more »

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On Labour Teachers and Labour teachers

This weekend, former government special adviser Sam Freedman wrote an interesting post about the role of blogging in policy formation. That was triggered by a speech in which Michael Gove mentioned a number of different teacher bloggers, and also mentioned more »

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A question of class

This is a cross-post from Labour Lords Jim Knight on why it’s time to lengthen the learning day not the school day Michael Gove managed to gather plenty of coverage for himself with his speech last Thursday at The Spectator education conference. more »

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Why isn’t our education system working?

This blog is cross-posted from Pragmatic Education     ‘Educational inequality is the civil rights issue of our time’ Barack Obama, 2011 Our retention, training, curriculum and assessment aren’t strong enough In 1807, radical journalist William Cobbett used an analogy to more »

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3 (and a Half) Ideas for Labour education policy

Labour education policy should deliberately deliver social mobility for disadvantaged students. 3 ½ ideas that will do this. First the ½ Only a half because it’s not a new idea but one that Labour should publicly and repeatedly support: “Pupil more »

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Gove won’t listen to academics or teachers, what about parental demand?

This is a cross post from educatingbrentwood The current Secretary of State for Education and I share two characteristics. We are both parents and neither of us has any professional experience in education. One of us likes to inform our understanding more »

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Academy accountability: eight big reforms

Cross-posted from Robert Hill’s blog. [We’ve recently hosted a number of contributions about what Labour education policy might look like: John Blake’s is here, Emma Hardy’s here, Dave Mingay’s here and Fiona Miller’s here. This post focuses on the specific area of more »

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