Due to a house move, there won’t be any Christians in Education updates next week. Don’t go away – we’ll be back just as soon as the new broadband provider permits.
Children who bully others need to understand the impact of their behaviour, the children’s commissioner for Wales has said. Speaking before the launch of an anti-bullying film, Dr Sally Holland said she was keen on restorative justice. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea just to say ‘don’t do it again’,’ she said. Read more
In truth, The Ofsted handbook might as well just say: ‘Get great results or your rating will never be any better than requires improvement.’ I don’t know why they bother with all the other standards. For all the talk of the importance of character, social and moral direction, pedagogy and ethos in the inspector’s handbook, it’s ultimately the results that matter. And only results. Read more
The DfE’s approach is often rather faddish. Education, like so many other areas of policy, depends on many factors—society, culture, economy—and it can be problematic to cherry-pick individual initiatives in the hope that they can effectively slot into our own system. Read more about the purpose of education from Neil Carmichael.
New powers are needed to allow councils to intervene in illegal schools and protect vulnerable pupils, according to the man ministers have appointed to rethink local authorities’ role in education. Alan Wood is not due to start his Department for Education review into the future of local government in education until the new year. But in an exclusive interview with TES, he revealed that he was already of the opinion that radical changes were needed. Read more
Former special adviser Rachel Wolf writes: ‘parents are fixated with one thing above all: standards. They don’t care about the structure of the education system, nor the status of their local school. What they do care about is what is taught and how – and the culture and ethos of a school. As we start to consider the next round of education reforms, it is this focus on raising standards that must lie at the heart of everything we do’. Read more
A few months ago, Toby Young joined forces with Sir Anthony Seldon, the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, to run an idea up the flagpole. Why not make it possible for senior managers from outside the teaching profession to retrain as heads? They proposed creating a mid-career and late-career entry track into this programme so successful managers in their thirties, forties and fifties can retrain as school leaders. Read more