ºìÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

The Cumbria Education Trust has been named as the government’s preferred sponsor for the struggling Whitehaven Academy. However, Cumbria’s largest chain, which has four primary schools and two secondaries already on its books, has said there are “many issues to review” before its board approves the takeover. The future of Whitehaven has been up in […]

The Liberal Democrats have pledged to scrap Ofsted and school league tables, in favour of a less “high-stakes” school accountability system that assesses teacher and pupil wellbeing. In a set of proposals due to be put to members at the party’s spring conference in Southport this weekend, the Lib Dem leadership calls for Ofsted to […]

Headteachers will join local government officials to give evidence to MPs about the state of alternative provision on Tuesday. The parliamentary education committee is running an inquiry into the quality and availability of pupil referral units and other alternative provision used for excluded pupils in England. The committee has held several hearings already. The first, […]

According to official Department for Education guidance, members of academy trusts have the power to appoint and remove trustees at will. The diocese of Truro is listed as a member of the St Barnabas Trust in its latest accounts. Another trust school, Millbrook Academy, was rated ‘RI’ when it joined the trust, and it remained […]

OCR will be fined £125,000 by Ofqual after partial answers to GCSE computing exam questions were found in textbooks it had endorsed. An investigation found the exam board had failed to “identify and monitor conflicts of interest”, when the authors of some GCSE computing controlled assessments had also written textbooks it endorsed. The textbooks included […]

Fraudsters impersonating headteachers have managed to con schools across the country out of tens of thousands of pounds in the latest scam to target the education system. Figures from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau show that since last September, 48 schools have reported the scam, most of them in December and January. Of those, 12 […]

Special-school pupils face “insurmountable” travelling distances to school and risk being “forced out of the system altogether” as transport services are cut, a think-tank has warned. New research by the Education Policy Institute has found that on average these pupils travel three times further to school than their mainstream counterparts. In rural areas, as many […]

The lowest-paid teachers at sixth-form colleges will get a two-per-cent pay increase under a deal struck between the National Education Union and the Sixth-Form Colleges Association. The SFCA, which represents 90 post-16 institutions across England, has agreed to increase the pay of everyone on points 1 to 6 of the national teacher pay scale and […]