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Legal challenges by schools over Ofsted judgments are often a “colossal waste of taxpayers’ money”, a senior inspector has said, telling schools to “bring it on”. Matthew Purves, Ofsted’s deputy director for schools, told an event in London today his organisation has “very consciously tried to make sure everything’s judged well and judged once” under […]

The government is considering withdrawing funding for BTECs and other qualifications that “overlap” with A-levels, Damian Hinds has announced. The education secretary has today launched a review of vocational qualifications at level 3 and below, including applied general qualifications, tech levels and technical certificates. Academic qualifications like A-levels and GCSEs will not be reviewed. We […]

A Microsoft researcher who also chairs the group behind the controversial master computing teachers programme has been put in charge of the government’s £84 million new computing education centre. Professor Simon Peyton Jones will chair the National Centre for Computing Education, the Department for Education has announced today. Alongside his work as a principal researcher […]

Ofsted is to launch a secondment programme for middle leaders who want to spend a year working as full-time inspectors, Amanda Spielman has announced. In a speech to the annual conference of school leaders’ union ASCL this afternoon, the chief inspector of schools set out plans for “one-year secondments to Ofsted for middle leaders”, so […]

The chief inspector of schools has sought to reassure headteachers that improving schools will not be penalised under Ofsted’s proposals to ignore in-house data. In her speech to the ASCL conference this afternoon, Amanda Spielman gave school leaders a summary of responses so far to Ofsted’s consultation on its new regime, which is due to […]

The current system of school league tables stigmatises schools and penalises those with the most vulnerable pupils, union leader Geoff Barton has warned. The ASCL general secretary told the union’s annual conference in Birmingham this morning that his organisation is “exploring a new approach to performance tables” in response to concerns from heads about the […]

GCSEs “rub the noses of pupils in disappointment”, the leader of headteachers’ union ASCL will say today, as he calls for changes to an exam system that denies a third of pupils the “dignity” of a qualification. Geoff Barton will address ASCL’s annual conference in Birmingham this morning, hot on the heels of an interim […]

Trusts given hundreds of thousands of pounds by the government to take over struggling schools have failed to expand, a Schools Week investigation has revealed. New figures obtained under the freedom of information act show that the Department for Education has allocated more than £126 million in sponsor capacity funding since 2013. Schools Week obtained […]

Less than one in five teachers in England have downloaded a toolkit launched by the government to help them tackle unnecessary workload. The Department for Education launched its workload reduction toolkit for teachers and school leaders last July. At the time, ministers were mocked and criticised for the timing of the release of the document, […]