Discover
Inside Your Ed

77 Episodes
Reverse
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 ...
Just before the end of 2024, the Government announced the outcome of their review of Level 3 vocational and technical qualifications, which are offered to 16 to 19-year-olds along with A-levels, apprenticeships and the new T-levels. The review confirmed that many vocational and technical qualifications that were going to have their funding removed will in fact continue to be funded. Well, at least until 2026. Or maybe 2027. It depends. And lots of qualifications will be defunded in any case....
Happy New Year and welcome back to Inside Your Ed. Regular listeners will know that this podcast usually focuses on the latest education news in England, but for my first episode of 2025 we are taking a quick trip over the Atlantic because, as you may have noticed, Donald Trump will start his second term as President of the United States on January 20th. So what plans does President-elect Trump have for K-12 education, from Kindergarten at age 5 up to 12th grade at age 18? Should colleges a...
“Labour will establish a youth guarantee of access to training, an apprenticeship, or support to find work for all 18- to 21-year-olds, to bring down the number of young people who are not learning or earning.” So said the Labour Party election manifesto in June 2024. Fast forward to the end of 2024, and the Labour Government confirmed in its Get Britain Working report that a Youth Guarantee is now up and running. However, the same report admitted that at the moment, the Youth Guarantee is ...
When it feels like every voter and politician has their own opinion on how to run the education system in England, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a credible, independent, evidence-led organisation that provided balanced information to politicians, government officials and the public on how to solve some of the biggest policy challenges. Well, as luck would have it, a new institute called the Centre for Education Systems, or CES, was officially launched in November. The CES has been ...
Nuclear fusion offers the tantalising prospect of being a potentially limitless source of clean and self-sustaining energy, but, as the old joke goes, nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, and has been for decades. I’m starting to get the same feeling about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, or LLE, which was first floated back in 2019 as a new way of funding Further and Higher Education courses in England. But the LLE took years to develop and it wasn’t until 2022 that the Conservative g...
On November 4th, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed that, for the first time since 2017, university tuition fees in England will rise from £9,250 to £9,535 for full-time undergraduates. The maximum maintenance loan available to students to cover their living costs will also increase by around 3%. Although these changes will do little to allay concerns about the long-term financial health of both universities and students, Bridget Philipson also said that the government would ...
If you were asked to pick out a success story from the last 14 years of education policy, I’m sure some people would point to England’s rise in the international rankings for global tests such as PISA. In 2022, England came 11th for maths, up from 27th in 2009. That’s why I was intrigued to see recent reports claim that the way we teach and assess maths needs to be overhauled to make up for several perceived problems. One of those reports came from the Royal Society’s Mathematical Futures p...
The most significant education policy launched at last month’s Labour Party conference was the release of new details about the Growth and Skills Levy, which is set to replace the existing apprenticeship levy as a way of funding apprenticeships and other forms of training. The government claims they will boost opportunities for young people through what they describe as an “ambitious” set of reforms courtesy of their new Growth and Skills Levy. But how ambitious are the government’s plans i...
It is hard not to raise an eyebrow when a government policy is described by some as a ‘vital lifeline’ for students, while others describe the same policy as ‘demoralising’ and ‘soul destroying’. The GCSE resits policy, which has been in place since 2014, continues to divide opinion among academics, researchers, school and college leaders and the frontline staff who support those students who must retake English and Maths GCSEs after not passing their exams first time around. So what is the...
Although complaints from universities about a perceived lack of funding continue to attract plenty of media attention, some very interesting shifts in policy thinking that are potentially more significant than simple questions about money are already underway. Several countries such as Australia, Wales, Scotland and Ireland have begun to talk less about universities and colleges in isolation and instead talk more about ‘tertiary education’, with the aim of bringing universities and colleges c...
Although this year’s exam season has largely passed without incident or drama, many exams and assessments throughout our education system are potentially facing their greatest ever threat in the form of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence, or AI tools. When freely available websites and apps can write entire essays, projects, articles, poems and stories as well as produce art and music among other things, it presents a daunting challenge to the teachers, lecturers and institutions tryi...
“Read my lips — I will bring immigration numbers down” said Keir Starmer during the recent General Election campaign. The Labour Party election manifesto also said that “Labour will act to create a secure future for higher education”. In isolation, both these goals are legitimate aspirations, but when you put them together it raises an interesting policy question: how will the new government approach the issue of international students coming to the UK, as these students increase immi...
Sometimes a UK General Election can be a tense and nervy affair with little indication of which party will prevail. The upcoming election on July 4th is not one of those situations, with the Labour Party miles ahead in the polls and set to form the next government. However, for today we are put the polls to one side and dive into what we’ve seen and heard over the past couple of weeks from the current Conservative government and the likely next Labour government. Which manifesto has t...
With a General Election just weeks away, people’s thoughts are quickly turning to which education policies the next government will try to implement. I think it’s fair to say that decisions made over the last 14 years have not always gone down well with teachers and lecturers or the people running our schools, colleges and universities. But would a new set of ministers, advisors and government officials really do any better, or would they end up facing the same barriers to desig...
Since the National Tutoring Programme, or NTP, was launched in 2020 to help combat the effects of the pandemic on children’s academic progress, it has provided 5 million tutoring courses to pupils of various ages at a cost of over £1 billion. However, these figures will not be increasing much further because the government has decided that after four years of operation, the NTP should have its funding removed and it will be closing down this August. So why has the government tur...
On the 16th of May, EDSK published a new report called ‘Evolution and revolution’, in which we set out a 10-year plan for reforming primary and secondary education in England. Our plan included, among other things, a Baccalaureate for all 14 to 18-year-olds that would bring academic, applied and technical courses together under one roof as well as everyone studying Core English and Core maths, otherwise known as literacy and numeracy, up to age 18. Bold as these proposals may sound, ...
Despite the endless debates and disagreements in education policy, there are some things that we can all agree on, such as the need for a fair education system. However, a new report suggests that while we may agree on the need for a fair education system, we may well disagree on what fairness actually means in practice. The report – titled Mapping the way to educational equity – offers a range of perspectives on how to define and use concepts such as equity, fairness and opportunit...
This time last year, we did a podcast episode about the growing problem of pupil absences in the aftermath of the pandemic, with record numbers of children and young people failing to attend school on a regular basis. Since then, finding ways to reduce absences has become a priority for both main political parties in England, and numerous initiatives have been put in place by the current government to try and address the problem. But despite all this extra attention, and in some...
“It’s not just a skill for learning, it’s also a skill for life. Not just for the workplace, also for working out who you are – for overcoming shyness or disaffection, anxiety or doubt – or even just for opening up more to our friends and family. We don’t do enough of that as a society, and I’m as guilty as anyone, but wouldn’t that be something precious for our children to aim for? I think so.” Those words from Keir Starmer in July last year were how he described the importance of ora...
Comments
Top Podcasts
The Best New Comedy Podcast Right Now – June 2024The Best News Podcast Right Now – June 2024The Best New Business Podcast Right Now – June 2024The Best New Sports Podcast Right Now – June 2024The Best New True Crime Podcast Right Now – June 2024The Best New Joe Rogan Experience Podcast Right Now – June 20The Best New Dan Bongino Show Podcast Right Now – June 20The Best New Mark Levin Podcast – June 2024