Bridget Phillipson’s speech to ASCL conference this weekend was interesting for a number of reasons. It’s a shame we couldn’t contrast it with Gillian Keegan’s, but as she said in her apology, that college visit to Darlington just couldn’t wait. Or maybe she was locked in pay negotiations. I can’t…

This week, slightly unnoticed, a lengthy but important report on school admissions landed from Simon Burgess and colleagues from Bristol. It’s a fascinating report, because it creates for the first time since mass academisation a dataset of how all 3,000 odd secondary schools in England run school admissions. (It’s also…

John Gill’s editorial in this fortnight’s Times Higher sets out the challenges for the new Secretary of State for DSIT (apparently known in Whitehall shorthand as ‘Technology Secretary’, ugh). As opposed to the normal “these are some things you can do”, he’s terribly meanly gone for “things you should not…

This week, the Prime Minister visited one of the new Family Hubs set up around the country and announced an expansion of them to more LAs. Although it was covered by the media, it hasn’t featured in any of the round ups of the PMs Big Political Week, which focused…

The NEU is about to go on strike across 7 days next month and into March. …

2023. New Year, new you. Though for the education sector, a little of the same old you might be preferable following the events of the previous 12 months. But what will we see in education in 2023? Here’s 10 predictions for the forthcoming year (with the 11th being, is this…

As we approach the end of 2022, which in many ways seems to have gone on for around a decade (the tiering system for Covid was at the beginning of this year? Really?), …

Sajid Javid this week became the twelfth Conservative MP to say that he’d be standing down at the next election. Is this just rats fleeing a sinking ship, and jumping before being forcibly deselected by the voters? Maybe. But there’s a number of reasons to suggest it might be more…

Myself and my colleague Jess Lister are currently midway through a project in New Zealand, where we are here for a couple of weeks to do some fieldwork for a really interesting project for the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, ahead of their 150th anniversary next year. We’ve been…