What’s been in the news just lately?
- Poorly qualified pre-school workers jeopardise the education of toddlers according to the Education Policy Institute.
- Don’t learn spelling, just use Google instead. It’s not advice teachers would give for sure. But MPs have warned that Google is promoting an anti-education message as its advertising campaign suggests children do not need to learn how to spell. Robert Halfon MP, chair of the education select committee, said:
They are creating a dependency culture, dependency on the internet. Its entirely wrong, they should be ashamed of themselves.
- The Education Policy Institute says almost a third of local authority secondary schools in England are unable to cover their costs.
* Almost one in three (30.3 per cent) of local authority (LA) maintained secondary schools were in deficit in 2017-18 – almost four times that of 2014 (8.1 per cent).
* The average secondary school deficit was nearly half a million pounds (£483,569).
* Significantly, there is a marked contrast between the proportion of secondary schools and primary schools in deficit – only 8 per cent of primaries were in 2017-18.
Many teachers are propping up the school budget by buying their own resources for their lessons.
- Siobhan Collingwood, headteacher of Morecambe Bay Primary School, says malnourished children are arriving at school so hungry they are taking food out of the bins.
- The importance of sleep for teens made the headlines again when in The Guardian it was reported that “The French education minister approved a proposal to push back by an hour the start of the school day to 9am for students aged 15-18 in Paris.”
- What is the “dirty secret” of educational innovation? 90% fail to provide positive effects and so it hardly ever works! Reported in The Hechinger Report and commenting on the US, Barbara Goodson, a researcher at Abt Associates Inc. says “It is really hard to change student achievement. We have rarely been able to do it. It’s harder than anybody thinks.”
- According to the Guardian, “If universities based offers on actual – not predicted – grades, disadvantaged students would get the break they deserve.”
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Ofsted launches a consultation on proposals for changes to the education inspection framework.