Schools

Does it matter that academy schools are defying Jamie Oliver’s fatwa against sweets? An organisation called the School Food Trust has found 89 of 100 academies guilty of harbouring tuck shops. Selling crisps, chocolate and even cereal bars. The Guardian is shocked and has made the story its page two lead. Schools with tuck shops, says the Trust’s director, ‘should be named and shamed for profiteering at the expense of pupils’ health… Mr Gove is putting ideology above children’s wellbeing’.   I plead guilty to having once been behind the counter at the tuck shop of Rosebank Primary in Nairn, blissfully unaware that I was poisoning Highland children with this

Good teaching matters; that’s something we don’t need to be taught. But how much does it matter? What are its measurable benefits? Today’s education select committee report collects some striking, if pre-existing, research into just those very questions, and it is worth reading for that reason. There is, for example, the IPPR’s suggestion that ‘having an “excellent” teacher compared with a “bad” one can mean an increase of more than one GCSE grade per pupil per subject.’ Or there’s the American study which found that the best teachers can ‘generate about $250,000 or more of additional earnings for their students over their lives in a single classroom of about 28

Iain Martin has flagged upan article from the latest Times Educational Supplement, in which a Norfolk sixth-form teacher bemoans overenthusiastic pupils. Yes — you read that right. In the article, Jonny Griffiths highlights the ‘other aggravation’ in a teachers’ life: ‘Sometimes ambitious children need to slow down. It is 4pm. My weary colleagues and I are slowly unwinding in the maths office, when there is a knock on the door. Could I have a quick word with Jonny, please?” says Michael in a bright, nervous voice. I don’t sigh, but inwardly I think, “Is that my ‘quick’ or yours?”’ And that’s just a fraction of it. The subsequent passage about Cambridge and Bangor is

It seems most of the public agrees with the need to improve our schools. A YouGov poll out this morning shows that 53 per cent think education standards have deteriorated over the past 10 years, while only 12 per cent think they’ve got better. 48 per cent think exams are too easy; just 28 per cent say they’re ‘about right’ and a mere 3 per cent think they’re too hard. And when it comes to discipline, the consensus of inadequacy is especially strong: 83 per cent say schools are ‘not strict enough’, while 0 per cent say they’re ‘too strict’. You don’t see 0 per cent in response to questions

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer’s ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money’s being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I’d recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that. They reveal finer detail about schools and results than has been made public before, such as about how ‘disadvantaged children’ (those on free school meals

ARK Schools, one of the leading City Academy providers, has just released another amazing set of results with GCSE passes 11 percentage points higher last year than were achieved in 2010. This is staggering progress, given that these schools are serving the same neighbourhoods with the same demographics as the council-run schools which they replaced. It is also a reminder that the City Academy programme, started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis and expanded by Michael Gove, can claim to be the most rapidly-vindicated social experiments in recent history. The results of ARK’s schools speak best for themselves: ARK’s formula clearly works, and I’d like to see it applied to many more

Speaking on the new Sunday Politics Show, Michael Gove said that it would take a decade for his reforms to change education in this country. Pressed by Andrew Neil on whether he would be able to reverse England’s fall in the PISA rankings, Gove remarked that it would take ten years before we can see whether his reforms have worked in reversing England’s educational decline in comparison to other OECD economies. Interestingly, Gove suggested that one of the measures of the success of his reforms was whether private schools started entering the state sector. He also defended his decision to force some schools to become academies. He argued that he

Michael Gove’s giving a robust defence of his plans to make it quicker and easier for schools to sack bad teachers. ‘You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,’ he says in the Mail. ‘Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?’ And he was similarly forceful in an interview on the Today programme, the full transcript of which we’ve got here. Gove is emphatic about how important this is. ‘The evidence is quite clear,’ he says. ‘If you’re with a bad teacher, you can go back a year; if you’re with a good teacher you can