More miscellaneous details

Tag: schools

  • No rise in private school closures in England since Labour’s VAT proposal, data shows – The Guardian

    More than 75 private schools closed every year in England on average over the last decade, official data has shown, with no apparent increase in the trend since Labour announced it was imposing VAT on fees. A number of media reports have highlighted the closure of some private schools as supposedly being caused by the policy, which is intended to raise money for more teachers in state schools. […]

    But data from a government register of private schools in England, collated in response to a parliamentary question tabled by the shadow education secretary, Damian Hinds, indicated that a churn in individual institutions is a longstanding trend. Since 1987, when data started to be collected, 2,583 schools have opened and 2,674 have shut. In the years from 2013 to 2023, 847 schools closed – an average of 77 a year. The 2024 data, which goes up to 6 October, shows that 46 schools have closed, slightly below the average trend, with 77 opening.

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  • Private senior school closes due to soaring costs – BBC News

    A private school in Lancashire is no longer financially viable and is having to close at short notice, its head teacher has confirmed. Jonathan Harrison, who is also proprietor of the Moorland School in Clitheroe, wrote to parents and carers on Wednesday to say the senior school would shut its doors on Friday. He explained Moorland could no longer operate because of factors including the imposition of VAT on school fees, falling numbers of full-fee paying students, uncollected fees, and higher operating costs.

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  • MIS market churn spring 2025 – WhichMIS?

    Looking across the January census figures from 2021 to this year, we see that the SIMS school numbers have fallen dramatically, from a healthy 15,753 schools using their MIS in January 2021 to just 8,818 this year. That is a loss of some 6,935 schools in just four years! This means that some 44% of their schools have moved away from SIMS in that time. It reduces their market share from 67% in 2021 to just 40% now. Looking further back, SIMS was the dominant player for many years, with around 85% of the market in England only ten years ago…

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  • Shock as Fulneck School, Pudsey, announces closure – Bradford Telegraph and Argus

    “This decision was not taken lightly, with trustees considering all available and viable options to ensure the school could continue. However, after careful consideration and no offers materialising, the difficult decision to plan to close the school was taken. Parents and employees have been informed, and we have now entered into a formal consultation process with Fulneck School employees whose roles may be affected. Our priority is now to work with all affected staff, pupils and parents to minimise the impact on them and support them throughout this process.”

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  • Fulneck School: Leeds private school announces shock closure with ‘deep regret’ after opening in 1753 – Yorkshire Evening Post

    The school statement read: “Despite the dedicated efforts of the school and the Fulneck Trustees to sustain pupil numbers, a continued decline in enrolment, combined with rising operational costs, has made it increasingly challenging to maintain financial viability. … The Trustees, Board of Governors and the school are “committed to ensuring that the school year finishes as planned”, with all teaching continuing until the end of the school year and pupils completing public and internal examinations as intended. In order to help students and families secure alternative schooling from September 2025 onwards, the school will be hosting a School Fair on April 2 at 2pm, with representatives from other independent schools set to be present.

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  • Unauthorised school absence widening ‘disadvantage gap’ in England – The Guardian

    School leaders endorsed the EPI’s analysis. Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “Too often, the burden of ensuring children attend school falls entirely on teachers and leaders, who are then held accountable for absences beyond their control. “Without a broader system of support, it is extremely difficult for schools to drive meaningful change in attendance rates.” Di’Iasio said that “for some families, school seems to have become – at least in part – optional”, and said fines for taking unauthorised termtime holidays were failing to halt that trend. “Far from solving the problem, fines often deepen tensions between schools and parents. Schools, simply enforcing the rules, are left looking like the villains,” Di’Iasio told the ASCL’s annual conference on Saturday.

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  • EBacc may ‘constrain choices’, curriculum review chair says – Schools Week

    The EBacc “may constrain” pupils’ choices and “limit access to” vocational and arts subjects, Professor Becky Francis has said as she outlined areas the curriculum and assessment review panel believe “need further attention”. Francis, who is leading the government’s curriculum and assessment review, also stated that “the current construction and balance” of some subjects “appears to be “inhibiting mastery, hindering progress and undermining standards”.

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  • ‘Barricade the doors’: Pupil describes school lockdown terror as boy killed – ITV News

    Sixth former Divine said: “I went outside and I saw three year 11s shouting, ‘someone got stabbed, come here’ to a teacher. I didn’t believe it at first so I went outside to see what was going on.” He said he saw a body on the ground. Despite a major emergency services response, the boy died at the scene.”I ran upstairs to the sixth form area and said ‘there’s a lockdown, there’s a lockdown, someone’s got stabbed’,” Divine said. “And then all the teachers started taking people to classrooms. I was really really scared, I didn’t believe it at first, but I saw what I saw… the staff were scared – they didn’t know what to do but then they started saying ‘go into classrooms, lock the doors, shut the blinds, barricade the doors’ because they didn’t know if the person with the knife was on the loose or was trying to get other people as well.” Divine’s brother, Leon, was at home when he was called by his brother. He said: “It doesn’t feel real, it feels like America – but this is Sheffield.”

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  • Ofsted sets out proposals for fairer education inspections and new, more detailed report cards – GOV.UK

    The Big Listen returned a clear message from parents, carers and professionals that the overall effectiveness grade should go, and that inspection reports should provide a more nuanced view of a provider’s strengths and areas for improvement. But there were different views on how to do that. Parents and carers favoured a clear assessment of a wider set of categories, while most professionals wanted narrative descriptions of performance. Today’s proposals aim to bring both preferences together.

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  • Ofsted offers first look at new report cards for schools – BBC News

    Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the plans would generate a “new league table based on the sum of Ofsted judgements across at least 40 points of comparison”. It would be “bewildering for teachers and leaders, never mind the parents whose choices these reports are supposedly intended to guide”, he added. Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the plans would “do little to reduce the enormous pressure school leaders are under”. Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said the five-point grading scale “maintains the current blunt, reductive approach that cannot capture the complexity of school life nor provide more meaningful information to parents”.

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  • Improving the way Ofsted inspects education: consultation document – GOV.UK

    The independent research we commissioned as part of the Big Listen polled other ways we could report on providers. Parents ranked ‘separate judgements for each inspection area’ highest (76% in favour). Professionals ranked this as the third highest (53% in favour). The highest rated options for professionals were ‘bullet point summaries of our findings’ (65% in favour) and ‘narrative descriptions’ (59% in favour). Taking this feedback into account, we propose using a 5-point scale to grade different areas of a provider’s work, such as ‘curriculum’ and ‘leadership’. Alongside grades, we will have short descriptions summarising our findings. These evaluations will make up our new education inspection report cards. There will be no overall effectiveness grade for early years, state-funded schools, non-association independent schools, FE and skills or ITE inspections.

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  • Ofqual to fine Pearson £250k over exams rules breaches – GOV.UK

    The breaches, which occurred in 2023, included failing to identify conflicts of interest among GCSE, A level and BTEC examiners, who were also employed by Pearson as tutors at schools where students sat the exams. Pearson also failed to follow its own policies designed to ensure the confidentiality of exam papers.

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  • Data protection in schools – Record keeping and management – Guidance – GOV.UK

    How to carry out an audit to check what personal data your school holds. You can use a data retention schedule to document how long you’ll keep different types of data for. The Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR says you should only keep data for as long as you need it. You should check each year what data you hold and if you still need to keep it. If you identify any information you no longer need, you should dispose of it safely. It’s important to put in place policies and processes so you can prove and evidence that you’re not keeping data for longer than necessary.

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  • Record keeping and retention information for academies and academy trusts – GOV.UK

    Academies and trusts should follow good practice and retain records about: pupils – a pupil record is defined in section 12 of the key stage 2 assessment and reporting arrangements; staff; buildings; finance; governance; the history of the school or academy (if applicable, including the ‘school history’ prior to the conversion to an academy) – examples can be found in The National Archives’ research guide on schools. All records should be retained in line with regulations and retention guidelines. Details can be found in the Academy Trust Handbook and Data protection in schools – record keeping and management.

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  • Education Secretary gives Bett Show 2025 keynote address – GOV.UK

    Over two thirds of those using generative AI in education say it’s having a positive impact. And we’re going further. Last week I announced that £1 million of funding has been awarded to 16 developers to help teachers with marking and tailored feedback for students. And my department continues to support the Oak National Academy, whose AI lesson assistant is helping teachers to plan personalised high quality lessons in minutes. And for children, that means more attention, higher standards, better life chances. For teachers, less paperwork, lower stress, fewer drains on their valuable time.

    Using AI to reduce work or help unlock the recruitment and retention crisis that we face, so that once again teaching can be a profession that sparks joy, not burnout. Where teachers can focus on what really matters, teaching our children. But not just teachers. We need to support leaders and finance professionals in schools too. That’s what DfE connect is all about. A one stop shop for leaders and administrators. It’s already helping academies to manage their finances, and we’ve just released new features that will help them understand and access new funding.

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  • Attendance and absence advice for adverse weather conditions – Lewisham Services for Schools

    Following the national weather warnings across the country predicted over the coming days, we thought it would be useful to publish advice on how to apply the new attendance and absence registration codes in the event of travel disruption or school closure associated with bad weather.

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  • Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand? – The Guardian

    It is popular to assume that we have replaced one old-fashioned, inefficient tool (handwriting) with a more convenient and efficient alternative (keyboarding). But like the decline of face-to-face interactions, we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff for efficiency, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.

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  • AI teacher tools set to break down barriers to opportunity – GOV.UK

    Kids are set to benefit from a better standard of teaching through more face time with teachers – powered by AI – as the Government sets the country on course to mainline AI into the fabric of society, helping turbocharge our Plan for Change and breaking down the barriers of opportunity. £1 million has been set aside for 16 developers to create AI tools to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored feedback for individual students in a fraction of the time, so teachers can focus on delivering brilliant lessons. […]

    The prototype AI tools, to be developed by April 2025, will draw on a first-of-its-kind AI store of data to ensure accuracy – so teachers can be confident in the information training the tools. The world-leading content store, backed by £3 million funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will pool and encode curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work which will then be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality content. […]

    Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work, according to a survey from TeacherTapp. However, most AI tools are not specifically trained on the documents that set out how teaching should work in England, and aren’t accurate enough to help teachers with their marking and feedback workload. Training AI tools on the content store can increase feedback accuracy to 92%, up from 67% when no targeted data was provided to a large language model. That means teachers can be assured the tools are safe and reliable for classroom use.

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  • Information management toolkit for schools – Information and Records Management Society

    Simplify your compliance journey with the IRMS Records Management Toolkit for Schools and Academies. A step by step guide with templates and examples designed specifically for Schools and Academies.

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  • So. Farewell then Progress 8 – FFT Education Datalab

    Much has been written over the years, including by ourselves, about how Progress 8 favours schools serving intakes with particular characteristics (and conversely how it works against others). For this reason we have long advocated for a contextualised Progress 8 measure to be published alongside Progress 8 and Attainment 8. But it will become apparent next year that Progress 8 is far fairer to schools serving disadvantaged intakes than raw attainment measures that do not take account of prior attainment. […] The picture is clear: the relationship between disadvantage and outcomes is far stronger for A8 than for P8. Put another way, the least disadvantaged schools will be even more likely to be ranked highly based on A8 compared to P8.

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  • WhichMIS?

    WhichMIS? is a free online publication for schools, multi-academy trusts and the wider education industry. It aims to present a balanced view of the MIS landscape in the UK, with views from all the key market players, as well as reviews, the latest news and expert commentary.

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