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This podcast takes a look inside the latest stories from across the education system in England including schools, colleges, universities and apprenticeships. Hosted by Tom Richmond.
103 Episodes
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SEND reforms to 'strip away' children's legal protections, charity says. That was according to a recent headline on the BBC website. Needless to say, the Department for Education, or DfE, disagrees, claiming that their planned reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities system in England represent “a clear expansion of children’s rights”. When so much money, time, effort and emotion is poured into the SEND system every day, any attempt to change the system was likely to prove co...
Normally a Schools White Paper from the Department for Education, or DfE, would attract plenty of attention on its release as it sets out the direction of travel on schools policy for the foreseeable future. But when the new Schools White Paper was launched on February 23rd, the media focus was instead on the DfE’s plans to reform the special educational needs system in England. Those special needs reforms will be the subject of my next podcast, but in this episode we are taking a deep dive i...
VAT on school fees, the end of their business rates relief, a big hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions, falling pupil rolls. It is no exaggeration to say that independent schools in England have had a very tough couple of years financially. These pressures have already forced some independent schools to close, but what if, rather than closing, these struggling schools became state schools instead? That may sound outlandish but, as my new report for the Private Education Policy ...
On the 28th of October 2021, the first ever episode of Inside Your Ed was released. Almost four and a half years later, I’m delighted to say that this is episode number 100 of Inside Your Ed – quite a milestone for a podcast with a tiny budget but a big interest in education policy. Of course, little did we know in October 2021 that just a year later, the launch of ChatGPT would herald the emergence of a new form of Artificial Intelligence, or AI. The long-term impact of this new Generative A...
“It’s been a terrible year to graduate and find a job” said a recent headline in the Financial Times. Other newspapers have also chipped in with equally gloomy headlines such as “Where have all the graduate jobs gone”, “It’s a jobs desert” and ‘It’s so demoralising’: UK graduates exasperated by high unemployment”. So why are so many seemingly well qualified young people finding it hard to get a job? To what extent is AI to blame for graduates’ labour market woes? And are the challenges facing...
Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you’ve all had a great start to 2026. Last year concluded with an action-packed autumn term of education policies, including the Curriculum and Assessment Review, a Post 16 White Paper and a new levy on international students along with several announcements on extra funding for schools and families. But fear not, because this year is already poised to offer plenty more drama and debates. A Schools White Paper is expected in the coming weeks, including ...
In January 2025, I recorded an episode of Inside Your Ed titled ‘Will the debate over vocational and technical qualifications ever end?’. It is therefore rather fitting that my final podcast of 2025 will prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this debate shows no sign of ending anytime soon. In November this year, the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review proposed the creation of V levels - a new set of vocational qualifications for 16 to 19 year olds that are intended to sit between a...
For the Higher Education, or HE sector, it may be starting to feel like one step forward is almost immediately followed by one step backward. Last year, the announcement of a rise in tuition fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a large increase in taxes on employers, including HE providers, which probably wiped out some, if not all the extra fee income. This year, the decision to again raise fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a brand new tax on HE providers in the form o...
“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.” Those words from then Children and Families Minister Edward Timpson back in 2014 accompanied the launch of a new system for supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short. A significant part of this new system was Education, Health and Care Plans, or ...
The goal was evolution, not revolution, and when the final report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was published on November 5th, that is precisely what was delivered. Across primary and secondary education in England, the Review proposed changes to the system as a whole as well as individual subjects, with all the changes firmly rooted in the evidence that the Review’s expert panel had received. The Government has accepted a large number of recom...
It is entirely normal for a Government to announce plans to reform either Higher Education (HE) or Further Education (FE). What is much less normal is a Government announcing a plan to reform HE and FE at the same time. The Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper, published on the 20th of October, sought to do precisely that, as it set out the Government’s plan “to educate and train the workforce of the future and give people the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.” So what are the ma...
Prime Minister Keir Starmer generated plenty of headlines at the Labour Party conference in late September when he set a new target of two-thirds of young people completing some form of higher level learning beyond school or college. Rather than hitting this target purely by expanding university degrees, the government has set an extra sub-target of ensuring that by 2040 at least 10% of young people pursue higher technical education or apprenticeships by age 25, a near doubling of today’s fig...
If you were looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future of Higher Education, or HE, in England, the last academic year was a rather disappointing spectacle. The inflation-linked rise in tuition fees towards the end of 2024 was swallowed up by the simultaneous increase in National Insurance costs for employers, including HE providers, while this summer’s Spending Review across all government departments offered no solutions to the sector’s funding woes. In contrast, this academic yea...
When Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, launched a consultation earlier this year on their new framework for conducting inspections, the response from teachers and leaders was pretty damning. That’s not to say that an inspection system is ever likely to be universally loved, but Ofsted’s original plans – which we discussed on this podcast back in February – created a huge backlash. So Ofsted went away and had another go, culminating in their new set of proposals for condu...
Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you all had a great summer. For many people working in politics, the summer break offers a gentler pace of life while most MPs and government ministers are away from Westminster. However, one former MP and minister decided that instead of putting his feet up, he should publish a new book that was almost destined to attract plenty of attention. At the start of August, former schools minister Sir Nick Gibb and his co-author Robert Peal launched ‘Reforming...
Since T-levels were introduced in 2020 as new technical qualifications for 16 to 19-year-olds, they have rarely been out of the spotlight. In the last two years alone we have had major reports on T-levels from the Education Select Committee in Parliament, Ofsted and the National Audit Office – none of which painted a particularly rosy picture of how these qualifications have fared so far. The latest in this long line of inquiries came on the 27th of June, when the Public Accounts Commit...
On Thursday 4th July 2024, the Labour Party won a resounding victory in the UK General Election. In their election-winning manifesto, Labour’s number one pledge within their mission to ‘break down barriers to opportunity’ was to recruit 6,500 new teachers. This pledge for 6,500 teachers has been repeated many times by government ministers in the 12 months since the election, but we’ve hardly heard anything about how the pledge will be delivered, or what it means in practice for schools and co...
On June 11th, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the result of the Government’s Spending Review, which confirmed the budgets that each government department will have until 2028. The Department for Education, or DfE’s budget will rise from £101 billion to £109 billion over this period – an increase of 0.8% after adjusting for inflation. So, is the Spending Review outcome a good or bad result for the DfE? How did schools, colleges and universities fare in relation to each other within the ...
I think most people would agree that England’s rise up the international education league tables over the past decade or so has been a welcome sign of progress. But when government funding is now in such short supply and is likely to remain so for some time yet, sustaining this recent progress may become increasingly challenging. A new report from IPPR and Ambition Institute, written by Loic Menzies and Marie Hamer, argues that the way in which we support and invest in the teaching workforce ...
Since the COVID pandemic, many jobs have been transformed by the dramatic expansion of hybrid and remote working. A recent survey by the education charity Teach First found that 80% of young people now want some element of hybrid work in their jobs – which sounds like bad news for frontline professions such as teaching. However, far from giving up the fight, some schools and trusts have decided to build flexible working models so that their teachers can enjoy some of the same flexibilities fo...
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