What’s in the news and what’s worth knowing about?
- The early learning gap between children in poverty and their peers has widened in 76 out of 152 local authorities in England, new analysis from Save the Children has revealed.
Girls do better than boys – 78.4% of girls attained a good level of development, compared with 65% of boys. The gender gap is decreasing, but very slowly, from 13.7 percentage points last year, to 13.5 percentage points this year.
Hackney is the only local authority in the country where there is no early learning gap at all. Across the country two in five (43%) of all poor children are struggling with basic skills at age five, compared to just over a quarter (26%) of their better-off classmates – a national early learning gap of 17 percentage points.
Save the Children’s report, It All Starts Here, draws on 368 survey responses and 51 phone interviews with the early years sector, including early years teachers, course leaders for the EYT programme, academics, and members of the wider early years workforce.
- Did your school break up this week ‘tired’? These schools did!
- The Policy Exchange says disruptive behaviour in schools is damaging children’s learning and causing an exodus from the teaching profession. See its new report “It Just Grinds You Down”.
- Ofsted published some short videos and slides which explain
their #curriculum research. They filmed a curriculum workshop. Have a look at the videos here: http://ow.ly/5YSu30n24c1 and the slides here: http://ow.ly/v5od30n24cp - The year might be drawing to a close but don’t forget that engineering is for life so add some interesting activities and bring the world and wonder of engineering to the classroom with The Year of Engineering and keep the conversation going.
- The government has published new primary school data for England but regard with caution and treat with a pinch of salt. 2452 schools are rated as ‘outstanding’ and 10098 are ‘good’.
- Andrew Moffatt, Emma Russo and Jimmy Rotheram have all been shortlisted for the annual Global Teacher Prize.
- Education Secretary Damian Hinds has announced an additional £350 million to support children with complex needs and disabilities. A drop in the ocean?
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Ex-PM Gordon Brown, who for six years has been United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, says education’s crisis needs five revolutions. He told the Yidan Prize Summit in Hong Kong that fundamental change was needed:
I suggest today we need a revolution in funding, a revolution in how we give status to our teachers, a revolution in the application of technology to education, and a revolution delivering particularly in the most difficult places in the world.
He said that a “revolution in willpower” was also required.