5 DAYS AGO - Twenty local authorities in England signed up eligible pupils without waiting for parents to do soA new scheme enabling families to sign up to free school meals has enabled 20,000 more children to be fed.As well as preventing those children from going hungry, the “auto-enrolment” pilot project is saving households hundreds of pounds a year. Continue reading... Collapse

7 DAYS AGO - Steinbeck’s book removed after some pupils felt distressed during discussions about its racial slurs During the Conservative leadership contest Kemi Badenoch wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph about immigration in which she suggested the UK should not be admitting migrants who do not accept British values. She said:We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnichostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here …Our country is not a dormitory for people to come here and make money. It is our home. Those we chose to welcome, we expect to share our values and contribute to our society.People assume that I’m always talking about Islam, but I’m not really. It’s one of many variations of culture which we have in the country because of immigration, especially the more recent immigration which has Collapse

7 DAYS AGO - Helen Pidd visits Lancaster Royal grammar school to see the work of Parallel Histories, an education charity which helps young people make sense of contested historyParallel Histories is an educational charity that offers a new way of studying contested history. It helps students navigate the history of Israel and Palestine, the Northern Ireland conflict, Putin and Ukraine, and the impact of the British Empire, and take courses on those it calls “great” leaders, including Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher.Pupils are split into two groups and assigned one side of an argument. They study historical sources that will support their view and debate with each other. Then, they switch positions and see all the information their opponents had access to, and debate again from their new perspective. Continue reading... Collapse

7 DAYS AGO - No quick fix for a system that is failing children and parents and pushing councils into insolvency£100m spent on failed efforts to block Send support‘Fobbed off and rejected’: Birmingham’s Send crisisIt was all meant to be so different. Announcing sweeping reforms of the special needs provision in England’s schools a decade ago, the then children’s minister Edward Timpson promised a simpler approach that would put the needs, rights and choices of families and children first.“For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system. These reforms ensure support fits in with their needs and not the other way round,” said Timpson. Continue reading... Collapse

21/12/2024 - Deputy head Vickie Johnson asked for a switch to part-time employment to balance work with parenthood but hit a brick wall that is causing problems in many schoolsTeachers in England should be allowed to work from home, education secretary saysVickie Johnson was a deputy headteacher at a small primary school in Greater Manchester working exhausting 60-hour weeks when she became pregnant with her son. “I had been leaving the house so early and getting back late, as well as working weekends and evenings at home,” she says. “I realised I wouldn’t ever see my baby and that wasn’t OK.”Negotiating her return to school after maternity leave when her son was four months old, Johnson tried asking for a switch to two-and-a-half days a week. Instead, she hit the brick wall that is still standard in many schools. “I was offered the option to come back full-time, which would have meant doing the same long hours I was before – or nothing.” With great regret, she felt she had to choose the latter, Collapse