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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.
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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...
Shortly before £1,000 tuition fees were first introduced in 1998, a landmark report by Sir Ron Dearing had pointed out that employers were also “major beneficiaries of higher education through the skills which those with higher education qualifications bring to the organisations which employ them.” This led Dearing to recommend that government should “seek an enhanced contribution” from employers towards the cost of Higher Education, or HE. Almost three decades later, these ‘enhanced contribu...
No-one is surprised when a newly elected government decides to create new initiatives and new organisations to signify a change in direction and a break from the past. Skills England, a new agency within the Department for Education, was announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer just after last year’s General Election, along with his observation that “our skills system is in a mess”. But since that announcement, Skills England has not had an easy ride, with some observers describing it as a po...
The Curriculum and Assessment Review, which is being chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was commissioned by the Department for Education last summer and will not conclude its work until this autumn. Even so, the Review has attracted so much interest from schools, colleges, teachers, leaders and parents that the interim report from the Review, published at the end of March, was an important and high-profile milestone. So what problems in primary and secondary education has the Review identifi...
Those who work in and around the Higher Education, or HE sector, have been having a rough time if recent media headlines are anything to go by. Since the turn of the year, there has been what’s felt like a constant stream of stories about universities making redundancies, cutting costs and scaling back their operations in an attempt to make themselves more financially sustainable. But despite all the gloom, one person is certainly not giving up on the HE sector. David Willetts was minister fo...
Seeing as the government is clearly short of spare cash, you would have thought the Department for Education investing in a new national programme to improve pupils’ outcomes would be well received. The Government recently announced over £30 million for a pilot of free breakfast clubs in 750 primary schools starting in April 2025 in advance of an expected national rollout of breakfast clubs in all primary schools next year. But far from generating positive headlines, the breakfast club pilot ...
Given the endless debates and disagreements about Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, Ofsted’s proposed new framework for conducting inspections was never going to go unnoticed when it launched in early February to kick off a 12-week consultation. But far from splitting opinion, a poll by Teacher Tapp of more than 11,000 teachers found that 0% of respondents were ‘very positive’ about Ofsted’s plans, and a mere 6% were ‘somewhat positive’. Meanwhile, a survey by the Nation...
Shortly after the General Election in 2024, the newly elected Labour government announced a Children’s Wellbeing Bill – a new piece of legislation that set out a range of policies such as a register of children not in schools, restrictions on branded items in school uniforms and greater powers for Ofsted to tackle illegal schools. However, just before Christmas, the Children’s Wellbeing Bill suddenly morphed into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and included a whole host of measures ...
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