Researchers also find lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in schools and say portion sizes sometimes not enough
Free school meal allowances are not enough for students from lower-income backgrounds to buy healthy school lunches, research suggests.
The study, presented at the European Congress of Obesity (ECO), involved 42 pupils aged between 11 and 15 at seven schools across the UK.
Continue reading...Long waiting lists and insufficient resources part of system that is ‘failing’ children, according to NEU members in England and Wales
One in three teachers say they have no behaviour support team for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), while one in four have no educational psychologist or speech and language therapist to help them, according to a union survey.
The online poll, which attracted responses from 8,000 members of the National Education Union (NEU), indicated that seven in eight teachers feel resources are insufficient to meet growing demand, with three-quarters calling for more learning support assistants in classrooms.
Continue reading...Gillian Keegan asks Bridget Phillipson to clarify after party refuses to commit to sticking to plan if it wins power
Labour is under pressure to clarify whether it would keep the government’s free hours childcare system, after the party refused to commit to the plan beyond the next election.
A shadow cabinet minister said on Monday that Labour “will not reduce” the number of free childcare hours parents were entitled to in England if it entered government.
Continue reading...Union says cuts will make the creative powerhouse unrecognisable and risk unprecedented industrial unrest
Staff at Goldsmiths, University of London have voted to strike over plans for an “almost incomprehensible” number of redundancies, a trade union has announced.
More than 87% of University and College Union (UCU) members at the south London institution voted for strike action in a ballot with a turnout of 69%, as well as backing action short of a strike, such as a boycott on marking papers and submissions.
Continue reading...Analysis across four exam boards in England reveals white artists comprise 91.6% of all mentions
Less than 3% of artists named in GCSE art exam papers are from Black or south Asian backgrounds, research has found.
Analysis of GCSE assessment materials from four big exam boards in England – AQA, Eduqas, OCR and Edexcel – showed only 8.4% of artists referenced across the 27 art exam papers were minority ethnic.
Continue reading...Committee calls on government to heed widespread concern and consider a more nuanced inspection system
The government should stop the use of single-word judgments such as “inadequate” or “outstanding” in Ofsted’s headline grades of schools in England, a committee of MPs has urged.
MPs on the education committee said relations between Ofsted and teachers had become “extremely strained”, with trust in the watchdog “worryingly low” in the wake of the headteacher Ruth Perry’s suicide last year after a traumatic inspection.
Continue reading...Opposition day motion seeks to create a council-maintained register of children in England not on the school roll
Labour is planning to use an opposition day debate motion to bring forward legislation for a new register of children who are not in school as part of plans to tackle persistent absenteeism.
New Labour analysis found that “one in three children currently sitting their GCSEs have missed nearly three months of secondary school since the pandemic” and said this was likely to affect academic attainment.
Continue reading...Worries about impact on neighbouring schools of money for Malmesbury primary in Wiltshire, near Dyson’s campus
A £6m donation from Sir James Dyson to help fund the expansion of his local state primary school has been approved by the government, despite concerns about the potential impact on neighbouring schools.
The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, announced on Monday that she had given the green light for the inventor’s donation to Malmesbury Church of England primary school in Wiltshire, which is close to Dyson’s research and development campus.
Continue reading...Thousands of concerned parents reportedly struggling to sign up for flagship offering that starts in April
A flagship government childcare scheme is at risk of “falling apart” with parents struggling to access new free hours and nurseries in the dark about if they can afford to provide care, according to charities.
Parents’ groups have accused the government of planning the new free offering “on the back of a fag packet”, with thousands of “furious” parents struggling to sign up for the scheme, which starts in April.
Continue reading...Latest attempt to tackle pupil absences criticised as failing to tackle the magnitude of the problem
The government is to make a new effort to repair sagging school attendance figures in England, with the education secretary to announce funding for “attendance mentors” in some of the worst-affected areas.
Pupil absences remain stubbornly higher than before the Covid pandemic, and during a visit to Liverpool on Monday Gillian Keegan is expected to announce plans for caseworkers to offer one-to-one support for pupils in 10 areas including Blackpool and Walsall, where rates of unauthorised absences remain far above national levels.
Continue reading...London boroughs among hardest hit due to falling birth rate and family struggles with Covid and rising costs
Primary schools are being closed, merged and shrunk as councils across England respond to falling numbers of pupils due to the falling birth rate as well as family upheaval triggered by rising costs, Brexit and Covid.
London boroughs are among the hardest hit, with thousands of school places being lost, but the closures and cuts extend to other cities and areas as they adjust to fewer children being born or moving into their catchment areas.
Continue reading...Lords report says there is too much learning by rote and many key Tory changes should be reversed
A major parliamentary report has called for an urgent overhaul of secondary education in England that would reverse many of the Conservatives’ key education changes of the past decade.
The House of Lords report says the education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is too focused on academic learning and written exams, resulting in too much learning by rote and not enough opportunity for pupils to pursue creative and technical subjects.
Continue reading...Education secretary’s letter emphasises copyright cannot be used as ‘excuse’ to withhold RSHE teaching resources
Gillian Keegan has written to schools in England ordering them to make the materials used in children’s sex education available to be seen by parents, warning headteachers there can be “no ifs, no buts, no more excuses”.
It is the second letter the education secretary has sent to schools on the issue, which has been seized upon by some backbench Conservative MPs amid claims that children are being exposed to inappropriate material during relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) at school.
Continue reading...Arif Ahmed pledges to remain politically neutral in his role and to ensure academic freedoms are maintained
England’s newly appointed university free speech tsar says his role is not to conduct “culture wars” and has pledged to be politically neutral in his efforts to combat threats to academic freedom.
Arif Ahmed, a former philosophy professor at Cambridge University, said he would measure his success or failure by surveys of students and by the number of complaints made under procedures being created by the Office for Students (OfS), England’s higher education regulator.
Continue reading...Head of National Education Union says new qualification would need 5,300 additional teachers in England
Rishi Sunak wants to scrap A-levels and replace them with a single qualification that includes compulsory English and maths, bringing upheaval to sixth-form education in England that would last a decade.
The new baccalaureate-style Advanced British Standard, which Sunak announced in his speech to the Conservative party conference in Manchester, would also kill off the T-level vocational qualification the government launched just three years ago.
Continue reading...LSE research suggests faith-based admissions requirements deter disadvantaged children
Church of England and Roman Catholic primary schools take fewer pupils with disabilities or special needs than other local schools in England, according to research that suggests faith-based admissions requirements deter pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The findings led the author, Dr Tammy Campbell of the London School of Economics, to conclude that faith schools “serve as hubs of relative advantage” for children from more affluent families who were less likely to have special needs.
Continue reading...Shadow ministers used ‘charitable status’ as shorthand for main goal of introducing tax changes
Has Labour flip-flopped on stripping private schools in England of their charitable status? Senior party figures from Keir Starmer down have certainly been guilty of using loose language, conflating such a move with their plan to apply VAT to private school fees and other tax breaks.
Starmer said in July last year: “When I say we are going to pay for kids to catch up at school, I also say it’ll be funded by removing private schools’ charitable status.”
Continue reading...PM wants pupils in England to study a wider range of subjects including maths and English until they are 18
The A-level system in England could be reformed with a new style of British baccalaureate in which children would study more subjects after the age of 16, according to reports.
The proposals include English and maths becoming compulsory up until the age of 18, the Times said. Students would also be required to study a wider range of subjects in post-16 education.
Continue reading...Prime minister says example set by schools will not necessarily have to be followed by other public buildings
Rishi Sunak has defended his government’s decision to shut down schools because of problems with crumbling concrete, as he aims to use this weekend’s G20 summit in New Delhi to draw a line under another bruising week in office.
The prime minister told reporters on the trip to India that his education secretary, Gillian Keegan, had done the right thing in ordering 147 schools to shut buildings made with aerated concrete, after officials became concerned about structural defects. On Friday evening the Scottish government said 16 of 32 local authorities have identified Raac in their schools.
Continue reading...Only four schools were rebuilt in 2021 in government scheme intended to cover 500 schools over 10-year period
More than half of English schools that are so dilapidated they are at risk of partial closure were refused money under the government’s school rebuilding scheme, Department for Education (DfE) statistics show.
Amid mounting concerns about a wider apparent neglect of the schools estate in recent years, beyond the immediate alarm about crumbling concrete panels, it emerged that of 500 rebuilt schools planned for England over 10 years from 2020, just four were completed in 2021.
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