The longest and most enthusiastic applause during Nicky Morgan’s first conference speech as secretary of state for education was for her predecessor Michael Gove. This seemed apt for a pre-election effort…
Devolving power to English regions and cities could offer a real chance to introduce more local oversight of the way academies and free schools are being managed. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have…
All schools in England have a considerable and increasing degree of autonomy over their budgets. Academies have more autonomy than those state schools still under local authority control over how they…
As a type of academy operating outside of local authority control, free schools act as their own admissions authority. They can choose the criteria they wish to use to prioritise the allocation of places…
Inequality and its rise across many developed societies poses threats of alienation and marginalisation and has been a feature of numbers of recent publications. Now research led by Simon Burgess at the…
“PISA shock” is the term that has been coined for the sense of political crisis and knee-jerk policy reaction that typically occurs when a country drops in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…
It was early and still quiet as I meandered around the recent Academies Show in London. Jars of promotional pens and key chains were lined up, while two young people in smocks painted the words “innovation…
Demonstrating her considerable skills as a teacher, in a recent lecture at the University of Birmingham, Estelle Morris posed a question that reminded her audience of the start of a children’s book. “Where…
Anne West, London School of Economics and Political Science
School-based education is undergoing significant changes across much of the developed world with private providers increasingly taking over the delivery of education from public providers. In both England…
In The Importance of Teaching white paper in 2010, the government committed itself to developing a “self-improving system of schools”. Four years on there is a risk that a two-tier system will emerge in…
Australian parents are increasingly choosing to spend more money on their children’s education. A report released last week showed parents who chose private education for their child were paying an average…
Most Americans agree that public education in their country is broken. The infrastructure of thousands of schools is decaying, scores on standardised tests are stagnant, and roughly 1.2 million students…
John Hattie: Welcome to The Conversation. My name is John Hattie from the University of Melbourne and I have here today, Pasi Sahlberg from the Department of Education in Finland. It’s certainly exciting…
In a political echo of the unseemly bi-partisan “race to the bottom” over asylum seekers, we now have a “race to the top” with the prime minister and opposition leader vying to offer the most support to…
School funding has been a tortured issue for government, and especially federal Labor governments, for most of the past half century. Since the seminal Karmel Report of 1973, the funding levels and relativities…
All is not well in the Australian school system. Australian schools are struggling to meet the achievement levels of OECD leader Finland. With the release of the commissioned research reports for the Gonski…
Australia has an unusually high proportion of children enrolled in non-government schools, when compared to similar nations. This dates back to the struggles between colonial governments and Catholic bishops…