Last week a survey of parents revealed that a large majority measure a school’s success on how happy the children are. Meanwhile, a very small percentage said they took SATs results into consideration when judging where to send their child to school and 73% said they thought their children were under too much pressure from…
This week several large MATs came out to attack Ofsted’s new framework as too “middle class”. Their main gripe appears to be that they can no longer sacrifice the teaching of more creative subjects in favour of more focus on the core subjects and teaching to exams, whether that be SATs or GCSEs. Some schools…
August saw one of the education success stories of the year. You may have read about the Michaela Free School in London and its inspirational headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh recording GCSE results any grammar school would be proud of. Michaela, which is based in the deprived area of Brent, saw more than half (54%) of its students…
Primary schools up and down the country would have received this year’s SATs results yesterday and spent all day digesting the figures to see where they stand. And with predictable great timing, a survey of primary school teachers was published yesterday morning just as headteachers were crunching the headline figures. Low and behold, 97% of…
A study of 5,000 children has shown pupils’ mental wellbeing is not affected by taking the 11+ exam – and this does not surprise me in the least. The University College London (UCL) research also showed that children report similar levels of wellbeing and school satisfaction regardless of whether they attend grammar school or live in…