We need a new Admissions Code The Parliamentary Commission report into Youth Violence is published today (March 26th 2020). It includes a set of recommendations from various fields, including housing, policing, employment and education. There are seven recommendations for education, one of which is that the ‘school Admissions Code should be revised and include the…
A Public Health Approach Can Work in Education Too It has been a privilege to be part of the Youth Violence Commission, and to work alongside professionals from a range of services and see how this has been shaped into a final set of recommendations. Through this we have sought to model how a public…
There’s a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen’s film The Dictator when the lead character Aladeen (played by Baron Cohen) finds himself in exile. Whilst there he discovers all those he thought he had sent to their deaths via execution are still alive. There were some parallels between this and the first Heads Up conference held…
I am sure I am not alone in grimacing when I click on any news link referring to a young death in London and hoping I do not recognise any names. The same applies to any court proceedings for something that could have, but did not, result in tragedy or a long prison sentence. Admittedly,…
Off-rolling has become a hot topic and rightly so. The aim of this blog (warning – it is a long one) is to augment the excellent work of others, particularly the rich detail of Education Datalab, with specific reference to Progress 8. Much has been said about how off-rolling has been used by schools to…
Many words have been written about the challenges of recruitment and retention for the teaching profession and clearly it is not getting any easier. Towards the end of my time as a secondary head in a large mainstream school it was almost a full-time business liaising with agencies, managing applications, talking to those you wanted…
At first glance the draft Ofsted framework looks like a step in the right direction. Finally, the curriculum is the key and so it should be. The word itself appears more than three times as often in the proposed framework as the current one. Examination results will potentially matter less, with outcomes wrapped up in…
Last week I attended the annual Damilola Taylor memorial lecture. The word ‘inspired’ is often over-used but it is what I genuinely felt. The speakers included many key players working in fields such as housing, politics (Vicky Foxcroft MP), social enterprise and academia. Most significantly, it included those who founded the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit…
Information continues to trickle through about the planned changes to the Ofsted framework due to be implemented from September 2019. The extent to which the profession finds itself hanging on every word is the best indication of how overwhelmingly significant the whole process has become. There are many things to admire about the way Amanda…
