Labour’s recent decisions to dilute plans to restrict social media access for under-16s and to put smartphone bans in schools on a statutory footing are misguided. It also comes on top of Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson’s plan for schools to ‘narrow the digital divide’ and enter a ‘new technological era’ by boosting the uptake of education […]
Free speech and peaceful assembly aren’t – or at least shouldn’t be – too difficult to understand. You need to be allowed to write or say what you like, and meet who you like, without worrying who you offend. However, this must stop short of assaulting people, deliberately and forcibly stopping them going about their […]
Labour’s Education Bill is making waves, and not in a good way. From angry politicians to disgruntled parents, education is once again a topic of furious discussion. At first glance, some of its provisions seem innocuous. No one is debating the need for increased SEND provisions for vulnerable children. But the problem lies about halfway […]
In the past few weeks, the school inspectorate, Ofsted, announced a significant change in how schools are regulated. These reforms were announced by Ofsted’s new Chief Inspector, Martyn Oliver, against a backdrop of controversy following a Berkshire headteacher taking her own life after her school was downgraded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. The problem the schools […]
There are some lessons in economics that must be covered again and again, to counter the allure of misleading promises from politicians apparently bearing gifts. Take the promise of a free lunch. No such thing exists, but voters keep falling for it. The Government’s decision to impose VAT on private school fees has been justified […]
It’s a testament to strange times when Tony Blair is seen to be talking sense – particularly when it comes to issues facing the young. But his recent intervention was a welcome one. Appearing on the ‘Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future’ podcast, the former Prime Minister touched on the growing tendency for young people to […]
Is there any problem that can’t be made worse by the big state slamming down its clunking fist? In the 2015 Budget, George Osborne, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that we were to have an apprenticeship levy – a new tax on businesses to fund apprenticeship schemes which was implemented in 2017. Osborne […]
Numbers matter in a democracy. The larger the cohort of voters, the more wary the politicians are of alienating them. It used to make the Labour Party’s electoral pitch pretty straightforward for several decades – they were for the poor, the working class – the majority – while the Conservatives were for the rich. Labour […]
Now that the new Government has settled in, its intention to deliver fundamental changes to the education system is clear. However, it is crucial to distinguish between change and progress. In reality, some of Labour’s proposed reforms risk harming educational standards and diminishing opportunities for working-class children. The proposed reforms fall broadly into three categories: […]
The UK’s higher education sector is failing on multiple fronts: 70% of universities are set to lose money next year, and students are suffering badly from degrees that have ever shrinking value. The so-called ‘graduate premium’ – the average additional annual earnings graduates receive compared to non-graduates – has been trending down for over 15 […]
I’ve never liked the saying, attributed to various French bureaucrats of the ancien regime, that ‘the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing’. Prudent farmers care not only about the hissing but also about the tolerable survival […]
In a Sun interview on 5 September, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson challenged opponents of the imposition of VAT on private schools to ‘put up or shut up’, and suggest another way to pay for her education reforms other than the Government’s new education tax. This article answers her question directly. First, let’s agree: we all […]
Teachers are not usually despised by the government of this country, but if you currently work in an independent school it is hard to escape the conclusion that, if they were allowed to do so, Labour would abolish the sector in a heartbeat. They hate us. The current Secretary of State for Education spent more […]
The Government’s announcement today that single-word Ofsted judgements are to be scrapped with immediate effect will be broadly welcomed by school leaders and teachers. For many, it signals a deescalation of the often fraught relationship schools have with their regulator, and anything which lessens that tension (albeit symbolically) is good news at the start of […]
One of the surprise bestsellers of the summer was a book on assessments. Admittedly, Sammy Wright’s ‘Exam Nation’ won’t hit the same sales figures as Richard Osman’s latest whodunnit, but to have any book on this rather dry topic reviewed in The Times (by Michael Gove), The Financial Times (by Melissa Benn) and The Guardian […]
Congratulations, kids! Over the last couple of weeks, there hasn’t been much to celebrate, so it was nice to read headlines about an excellent tranche of A-level results. Across the UK, grades rose for the first time since 2021, with 27.8% of them marked at A* or A. New figures suggest that 376,470 applicants were […]
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